Under the Knife(54)

Darcy. Spencer. Jenny Finney.

A perfect storm of crappiness.

“Am I correct?” Finney asked.

And now, a sudden insight: She was inching toward insanity.

“Dr. Wu?”

Yes. Insanity.

Definitely.

She felt its approach as if she were groping blindly down a darkened train tunnel, and somewhere up ahead, unseen, a speeding freight train—the insanity—was bearing down on her. She wanted to go back, out of the train tunnel and away from the train, but she could not; Finney’s voice in her head kept nudging her forward, toward the speeding train. Toward insanity. And she had no way, no way at all, to stop the train, or herself.

No way out.

“Dr. Wu.”

Still.

It might not be so bad, she thought. Insanity.

It would hit her head-on, knock her into oblivion; and then she wouldn’t care about any of this, and she could hang out with Moses, her former patient, on the psych ward. Talk Scripture, or something. It’d be nice. They could become buddies.

Then she heard her father in her mind: Situational awareness, lovely Rita. He sounded calm, and the calmness pulled her out of the pitch-black train tunnel. Keep him talking. Gather more information. There are always options. You can get through this. Your kid sister needs you. Darcy needs you, lovely Rita.

She took a deep, shuddering breath. Right. Darcy. She needed to think about Darcy.

The train tunnel receded.

“Dr. Wu. Answer me, please.”

She now was done dressing. She glanced at the orthopedic surgeon, who was absorbed in her texting, and took a seat on the bench in front of her locker. She bent over to tie her sneakers.

“The two of us got by okay,” she said to her sneakers.

“You may have, Dr. Wu. Darcy’s path has been somewhat … shakier, it seems to me.”

“Darcy has done fine. Not that it’s any of your business.”

Situational awareness.

“Oh, but I think it’s very much my business.”

“The hell it is.”

Rita finished tying her sneakers and sat straight up.

The orthopedic surgeon was staring at her.

“Hi,” Rita said.

The woman went back to her texting.

Rita stood up, grabbed her glasses, and slipped them on as a text came through on her phone. They were ready for her in OR 10. Her stomach clenched.

I need to operate on Mrs. Sanchez.

“Ah,” Finney said. “Excellent.”

But why did she need to operate on Mrs. Sanchez? Where was this urge coming from? Why must she operate, even though she still knew in her heart it wasn’t the right thing to do? Operate. Don’t operate. It felt like a mental tug-of-war, pulling her brain apart, like taffy.

Operate.

Don’t operate.

The image of the train tunnel was returning, like a fade-in at the beginning of a movie.

“Dr. Wu?” Finney said after several seconds. “Let’s not keep them waiting.” Pause. “For Darcy’s sake.”

Darcy.

The train tunnel faded again.

She slammed the locker door closed.

Startled, the orthopedic surgeon dropped her phone.

“Sorry,” Rita mumbled as she picked the phone up off the floor and handed it back to her. The woman eyed her warily. “I mean, well—just, sorry.”

Rita felt the woman’s eyes drill into her back as she walked away.





SEBASTIAN


Once the tour group had changed into scrubs, everyone settled into plush seats in a pristine amphitheater adjacent to the main entrance of Turner’s operating rooms. In all his reconnoitering, Sebastian had not been in here before and was struck by its newness. It had the look of having been built, or perhaps remodeled, recently, with clean walls and shiny fabric on the chairs, and possessed a new-car kind of smell.

Montgomery took position on the dais in the front of the amphitheater. He wore an immaculate white coat over his scrubs, with his name embroidered in cursive over the left front coat pocket, and the Turner logo—a modified caduceus in which a trident replaced the staff—stitched across the right. A large, high-def monitor stretched the length of the wall behind him, on which floated the logos for both the University of California and Turner, tracing random paths across the screen. As he moved across the dais, the fabric of his white coat wobbled, so crammed was it with starch. He reminded Sebastian of a CEO launching a new product.

“Several years ago,” Montgomery said, his voice amplified by a small cordless microphone on the collar of his white coat, “a group of us surgeons here at the University of California asked ourselves how we can do things better.”

The lights in the auditorium dimmed. The logos on the screen disappeared, replaced with a picture of a group of surgeons wearing long white coats, scrubs, and broad smiles. They were standing in front of the main entrance to Turner. One was Wu; another was Montgomery. The camera panned across them in an unhurried, diagonal arc, like a documentary.

“Surgeons are creatures of perfection. We obsess about it. We don’t accept average, or even good enough. We strive, always, for perfection. In that spirit, we here at Turner didn’t ask ourselves: How do we lead the pack? We asked ourselves: How do we get so far out in front of the pack, we change surgery forever? To paraphrase the great hockey player Wayne Gretzky: We decided we didn’t want to go to where the puck is—we wanted to go to where the puck is going to be.”