Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [264]
Shiva said to Deepak, “You said there was a second reason you had initially dismissed the idea of a transplant. What was it?”
Deepak said, “Before he lost consciousness, Marion made me promise not to transfer him. This hospital was special to him. It was more than a place for us foreign medical graduates to train. It welcomed us when other places did not. This is our home.”
Hema sighed and dropped her head into her hands. Just when they had come this far, another obstacle.
“We can do it here,” Thomas Stone said softly. He had listened to Shiva without moving a muscle, and those blue and steady eyes were now shiny and bright. He pushed his chair back and stood up, his movements purposeful. “Surgery is surgery is surgery. We can do it here as well as anywhere if we have the tools and the people. Fortunately, the world's expert in splitting the liver is sitting right next to me,” he said, putting a hand on Deepak's shoulder, “and the tools, many of which he designed, are also here and will need to be sterilized at once. We have a lot to get ready. Hema, at any time if you or Shiva have a change of heart, all you need to do is say so. Shiva, please don't eat or drink anything from this moment on.”
As he walked past Shiva's chair, he clamped his hand on my brother's shoulder, squeezed hard, and then he was gone.
CHAPTER 52
A Pair of Unpaired Organs
AHELICOPTER FROM BOSTON GENERAL landed on Our Lady of Perpetual Succour's helipad during the night. It brought special instruments and the key personnel from Boston General's well-oiled liver transplant program. The corridor outside Our Lady's operating suites, normally a desolate stretch where one might find an empty stretcher or a portable X-ray machine parked while the tech took a cigarette break, was now like battalion headquarters at the start of a military campaign. Two large blackboards had been set up, one labeled DONOR and the other RECIPIENT, each listing what had to be accomplished with a check box next to the task. Our Lady of Perpetual Succour's team with Deepak as lead surgeon would handle the donor (Shiva's) operation, and the Boston General crew with Thomas Stone as lead surgeon would staff the recipient (my) surgery. The Our Lady team wore blue scrubs, while the Boston General crew wore white, and just to be certain, the former had a big D (for “donor”) marked on their hats and scrub shirts with a black marker, whereas the latter had an R. The adrenaline flow kept these disparate teams in good spirits; one Bronx wag even suggested to his Dorchester counterpart that they could call the teams Crackers and Homeboys. Only Thomas Stone and Deepak Jesudass would be common to both teams, each man assisting the other.
A dry run at midnight with dummy patients in both operating rooms had uncovered a few critical glitches: anesthesia from Boston General needed a better orientation to the setup at Our Lady, and there was need to anoint a “ringmaster” whose job was to be timekeeper, to keep abreast of the activities of both teams, and who was the only person authorized to carry and, most important, record all messages from Team R to Team D and vice versa. Two new blackboards were brought in to be placed inside each theater, and tasks to be ticked off written on these. Our Lady of Perpetual Succour was put on diversion, with trauma being rerouted to other hospitals in neighboring boroughs. By 4:00 a.m. it was time for the real thing.
Thomas Stone threw up in the surgeons’ locker room. The Our Lady crew saw this as a bad omen, but the Boston General crew assured their counterparts that a pale, diaphoretic Stone augured a good outcome (though in truth, they had never seen him quite so pale and weak, lying prostrate on the bench, a puke basin at his side).
With so many people from two hospitals involved, it would have been difficult to keep the operation a secret. There were two television crews parked outside Our Lady. Newspaper editors were past the deadline for the morning paper, but they were preparing to weigh in on the ethics of this