Under the Knife(70)

She knew that she was responsible. That she’d been the one to stab the liver. But she didn’t understand why—

(Finney, it had to have been Finney)

—she’d done it. Staring at the video screen, she felt as if she’d just emerged from a horrible nightmare—

(Finney had made her do it, somehow)

—except that the nightmare wasn’t ending. The ugly image on the screen, of the Swiss Army sticking like a skewer out of Mrs. Sanchez’s liver, horrified her.

But she couldn’t worry about any of that now.

Chase made a loud noise. A strange sound; and, oddly, one of the things Rita would later remember most about the whole horrible morning. It reminded her of the dolphins at Sea World she’d seen with her parents when she was little, blowing air through their blowholes as they’d surfaced.

She gritted her teeth, steeling herself for the inevitable, her hands still wrapped around the Swiss Army. And she waited.

She waited for the bleeding.

Nothing happened.

Five seconds went by.

Nothing.

Ten improbable seconds.

Still nothing.

The room, crammed as it was, remained silent except for the beep of the cardiac monitor, which broadcast the steady beat of Mrs. Sanchez’s heart.

Hope. Or a sliver of it, at least.

Maybe the scalpel had managed to miss the big blood vessels. Or, maybe it hadn’t, but the Swiss Army was now holding pressure against whatever bleeding was occurring under the liver’s surface. Both scenarios were manageable.

God, could she really have been that lucky?

Fifteen seconds.

Dumb luck.

It happened sometimes. This one time, a drunken frat boy climbing over a wrought-iron fence had slipped and impaled his thigh on an arrow-shaped ornament. The firefighters who’d found him, dangling from the top of the fence like a fleshy flag from a flagpole, had given him hefty doses of painkillers before cutting him free, but smartly left the metal strut sticking through his leg.

Good God, what a freak show that had been in the ER, with two feet of iron bar sticking out of the kid’s leg. But when Rita had rushed him to the OR, she’d discovered that the bar had missed every single vital structure in his leg—blood vessels, nerves, bone: sparing his leg, and maybe even his life. Dumb luck.

Rita was all for dumb luck. She loved dumb luck. She prayed that dumb luck was smiling upon them now and that maybe Mrs. Sanchez would still walk away from all of this.

Twenty seconds.

No bleeding.

Behind her, she sensed Lisa and Thomas moving quickly, opening additional sterile packages of surgical instruments, the kind needed to fix big holes in major organs and big blood vessels.

Good.

Rita allowed her hands holding the Swiss Army to relax. She started calculating ways by which she could salvage this, her mind flipping through potential treatment algorithms, calculating her next, best move.

“Lisa—” she began.

That’s when the bleeding started.





SPENCER


On the giant wall screen, the blood fountained around the Swiss Army like an enormous red geyser.

Christ, Rita! What have you done?

Someone gasped. Spencer couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman: either a man with a high voice, or woman with a low one. Except for the pulsating blood on the screen, though, it was a moment frozen in time. No one moved.

Until, as if from some agreed-upon, unspoken cue, everyone moved at once.





RITA


The blood shot up and away from the liver in high-pressure spouts timed with each beep of Mrs. Sanchez’s heart on the cardiac monitor. Droplets hit the camera, splattering across the lens, like red paint—

(like red rain just like that old Peter Gabriel song red rain coming down red rain pouring down over me what’s wrong oh God what’s wrong with me concentrate dammit concentrate…)

—on to a window, clouding the field of vision.

She shook her head, trying to sweep it clear of these addled thoughts—thoughts that seemed to be coming from outside of her, from elsewhere, and tried to focus on the video screen, and on saving Mrs. Sanchez’s life.

From out of her peripheral vision, she saw Chase rushing from the room. He was shouting to Lisa and Thomas that he was going to scrub, and to grab him some sterile gloves and a gown, and the laparotomy tray with the vascular clamps.

(Laparotomy tray that’s for emergencies that’s for making big incisions in people’s abdomens to stick your hands inside to stop bleeding…)

She shook her head again, more forcefully: Concentrate!

Then a rushing sound in her left ear, and the room spun at crazy angles; slowly at first, then faster and faster.

She staggered away from the OR table and vomited into a nearby trash can.

(In the trash can at least and not all over the floor in front of all these people…)

Then the dark closed in from the margins. Embraced her; enveloped her mind. It was … soothing, like sliding into a warm Jacuzzi when you had aching muscles, or climbing into bed at the end of a really, really long day: maybe the very longest day of your life.

So she gave in to the dark because it felt good. Besides, she was too tired to fight anymore.

But as she slid into unconsciousness, one thought—a terrible, sickening one—raced through her mind: Mrs. Sanchez was going to die.