Under the Knife(9)

This was new. Where had it come from?

Forty. That’s where, idiot. You’re getting old, Spencer.

So what was causing it? Bursitis, maybe? Medial collateral ligament strain? Stress fracture?

Gotta get that looked at.

He glanced at his watch. He had surgery this morning at Turner, and he wanted to squeeze in some free weights and push-ups before showering and changing for work.

He ignored the pain in his knee—and the mental image of the Fiesta in front of Rita’s—and ran faster.





RITA


Rita’s first code—not the first one she ran, but the first one she saw—was carved into the circuitry of her brain, an event as indelible as any she’d known.

Because it was the first time she realized she wanted to be a surgeon.

She clung now to that memory with a fierceness that made her think of a movie she once saw about fishermen (one of them was George Clooney) caught in a monster storm out in the middle of the ocean. Like she was one of those guys, flung overboard, flailing in the mountainous waves; and the memory was a life preserver thrown from the ship, the one tiny thing in the universe preventing her lungs from filling with icy water and dragging her to the bottom of the North Atlantic.

As the memory took shape, it began to crowd out her panic, filling her mind with the sights and sounds of this singular occurrence in her life.

She’d been a third-year med student, fresh out of the classroom and terrified by the prospect of treating real, honest-to-God patients. She’d been working a twenty-four-hour shift, the very first time she’d spent the night in a hospital, and it was late at night. Or maybe early in the morning: Who could tell after sixteen-plus hours of scrambling from one perplexing task to the next, one far-flung corner of the hospital to the other, with barely time for a pee break? No exaggeration. She was having trouble finding sixty seconds for a routine biological function she’d always taken for granted.

I mean, who doesn’t have time to pee?

She’d been screamed at by a brilliant but scary female cardiology professor who told Rita she was just too damn timid, for God’s sake and asked her if that was, like, an Asian-girl thing or something; urinated on while trying to put a bladder catheter in a semiconscious drunk; felt up by a leering, ninety-year-old bed-bound troll pretending (she was sure) to have dementia; and almost impaled by an intern fumbling with a hypodermic needle as thick around as a broom handle.

Then, when she’d finally stolen a minute to put her head down, she’d gotten lost looking for the student sleeping room. God, but she’d been tired. She’d begun to understand why sleep deprivation was used as torture. Even waterboarding, she’d reflected, had to be easier than this. She was spent, emotionally strung out, and wondering if she’d made the right career choice.

So there she was, wandering the hospital in the middle of an interminable night (morning?) looking for a bed like a zombie hunting for human flesh, when she heard it.

Shouting.

Down a corridor lined on both sides by patient rooms. Loud and desperate, with one voice rising above the others, shrieking with pain.

She stopped and looked down the hall. Her muscles and joints, every part of her, groaned with fatigue. But she was curious. What could trigger that kind of yelling in the middle of the night in a hospital?

Curiosity won out. She turned and followed the noise to a patient’s room down the hall. She peeked inside.

Her exhaustion disappeared.

The room was crammed with a dozen raw recruits of the medical world. Junior residents and interns. Young nurses barely out of school. Fellow med students. Not an experienced doctor in sight—not surprising, really, because in the hierarchy of medicine, what person in their right mind with any seniority would be working at that hour?

All were pressed together around a patient’s bed. Through the thicket of bodies, she caught glimpses of a small, brown man with snow-white hair—about fifty, maybe? Hard to tell, because he gave the impression of a younger person who looked much older.

His eyes.

That’s what she remembered most. The whites turned dirty yellow (Jaundice, she’d thought to herself, it’s called jaundice, a sign of liver failure), and wide with terror. His shrieks had been the ones carrying down the hall.

He was lying on the bed, writhing and screaming in a foreign language, several gloved pairs of hands trying to restrain him. His flimsy hospital gown slipped off his shoulders to reveal an abdomen swollen to the size of a basketball and a neat, vertical line of metallic staples that ran like a zipper from his sternum to his belly button, marking the site of a recent surgical incision.

The man interrupted his howling long enough to vomit bright red blood, which splattered across his bare chest in a pattern that reminded Rita of the finger paintings on display in the lobby of the children’s hospital next door.

She looked away, repelled; then, intrigued in the way of a driver slowing to get a better look at a traffic accident, pushed her way into the room. The air was heavy with odors: sweat, urine, feces, ammonia. A young doctor she judged to be an internal medicine resident stood at the head of the bed, squeaking instructions to the interns and nurses. He seemed more scared than the patient. He had an adolescent whisper of chin hair and a brush of acne highlighting his cheeks, as if a kindergartner had streaked red crayon across them.

The interns and nurses did their best to follow Dr. Acne’s instructions. All kinds of things were going on that Rita didn’t understand. None looked good: needles jabbed into veins, wires connected to electrodes, IV bags of medicine hung. The med students stood and stared. Rita sensed that Dr. Acne and the interns meant well but didn’t have a clue. It had been the second week of July, right after med-school graduation, and most of them, she knew, were almost as green at this as she was.