Under the Knife(72)

She wasn’t sure.

“What … what happened to me?”

“I was going to ask you the same question, Rita. You’re in the ER. What’s the last thing you remember?”

She twisted the bedsheet in her hands. “The bleeding. Mrs. Sanchez. My patient. Is she…”

“Dead? No. Remarkably enough, she’s fine.” He placed his phone on the arm of his chair. “Extubated and resting. Didn’t even need a blood transfusion, if you can believe that. Her biliary tree is intact, thank Christ, but we’re going to keep a close eye on her for a few days, just to be sure she doesn’t develop a delayed bile leak.”

“So … you were able to stop the bleeding?”

“Oh, yes. Yes we did. With some unexpected help.” He shook his head. “If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I never would have believed it. After you … harpooned … that patient’s liver, Delores’s safety protocols kicked in.”

“The—safety protocols?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t know we had turned them on.”

“Neither did I. We’d loaded the software into the onboard system but hadn’t activated it, or been expecting to use it. The engineers are sifting through the data, trying to figure it out. But it looks like Delores recognized the bleeding and automatically engaged the safety routines.”

“The safety routines worked?”

“Oh, God, yes. Did they ever. Better than we ever could have hoped. I’ll be damned if the goddamn thing not only repaired the liver laceration but managed to finish most of the cholecystectomy before we shut it down, and I got in there. It worked that fast. I couldn’t believe it. Christ. It was goddamn eerie. Like it had a mind of its own.”

He grunted. “You didn’t have to be a doctor to appreciate how … impressively Delores performed. That reporter from the Wall Street Journal was poking around afterward, insinuating we had somehow staged the entire thing to show off Delores’s safety features. Goddamn conspiracy theory, of course … but strangely, Rita, your complete, incomprehensible incompetence made Delores look even better than we’d intended.”

“Chase, about what happened—”

His hand shot up, palm out. He turned off his phone (she’d never seen him do that before), and put a finger to his lips; then he rose from the chair, slid the glass door closed, and drew a curtain across it. The glass was thick, and save for the trill of the pulse oximeter, silence enveloped them.

He sat back down with a severe expression. “Rita. Listen to me. Listen very, very carefully. God knows why you did what you did. But I’m not joking, and I’m not fooling around—”

“I realize that, Chase, but—”

“—because you are in really big trouble. Before you say anything, anything at all to me, would you like to talk to a lawyer?”

“Why would I want to do that?”

He dragged his hand down his face, leaned forward, and squinted harder.

“The tox screen, Rita.”

She shook her head. “I don’t understand. What tox screen?”

“The tox screen we sent here in the ER. On you.”

A tox screen. So: They’d tested her blood for alcohol and drugs. And, come to think of it, they’d probably checked her urine, too—an unpleasant half memory now surfaced of someone catheterizing her bladder.

“Why on earth would you send a tox screen?”

“Dammit, Rita. Why wouldn’t we? It was medically indicated. We didn’t know what the hell was going on with you. I mean, first you impaled that woman’s goddamn liver.” He guffawed. “In front of the goddamn chancellor of the university. Oh, and don’t forget The Wall Street Journal. Then you puked all over yourself, collapsed, and seized. What a goddamn mess.”

“Seized?”

“Yes.” He got up and started pacing at the foot of her bed. “Grand mal. You stopped breathing. Scared the shit out of us. We called a code and brought you down here. A tox screen is part of the workup.” He sat back down on the edge of the chair. “You know that.”

“What did it show?”

Chase glanced over his shoulder at the closed sliding door and the drawn curtain. He scooted the chair closer to Rita’s bed. Its four legs screeched unhappily across the floor.

“What didn’t it show, Rita? Traces of cocaine. Methamphetamines. Heroin. Some benzos. A blood alcohol level of 0.04%—not enough to be legally drunk in California, but with everything else, it kind of adds a what-the-hell-were-you-thinking twist. You know?”

She said, in a small voice, “What?”

“Booze and illegal drugs, Rita. In your body. While you were operating.”

“But, that can’t be, there must be a mistake—”

“No.”

“But, I—”

“Is that what you were doing here last night?”

“What?”

“Is that how you ended up in OR 10 this morning? Did you take off your clothes and pass out?” He drew his hand down the length of his face, slow and hard, and laughed bitterly. “Sleepwalking! Sleepwalking. You said you were sleepwalking. Goddammit, Rita. If we inventory the drugs in the anesthesia cart, in OR 10, will some of them come up missing?”