Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [90]
Ghosh noticed that Hema's bedroom closet was now a shrine dominated by the symbol of Shiva: a tall lingam. In addition to the little brass statues of Ganesh, Lakshmi, and Muruga, now came a sinister-looking ebony carving of the indecipherable Lord Venkateswara, as well as a ceramic Immaculate Heart of the Virgin Mary and a ceramic crucified Christ, blood welling out of the nail holes. Ghosh held his tongue.
Without fanfare and quite unexpectedly, Ghosh had become Missing's surgeon. Though he was no Thomas Stone, he had now handled several acute abdomens (his stomach fluttering just like the first time) and dealt with stab wounds and major fractures and even put in a chest tube for trauma. A woman in the labor and delivery room had suddenly developed airway obstruction. Ghosh ran in and cut high in the neck, opening the cricothyroid membrane; the aspirate sound of air rushing in was its own reward, as was the sight of the patient's lips turning from deep blue to pink. Later that day, under better lighting in the operating theater, he did his first thyroidectomy Operating Theater 3 was now a familiar place, but still fraught with danger. Nothing was routine for him.
On the day the twins turned two months old, Ghosh was in mid-surgery when the probationer poked her head in to say that Hema urgently needed him. Ghosh was removing a foot so destroyed by chronic infection that it had become a weeping, oozing stump. The boy had traveled alone from his village near Axum, a voyage of several days, to beg Ghosh to cut off the offending part. “It has stuck to my body for three years,” he said, pointing to the foot that was four times the size of his other foot and shapeless, with toes barely visible.
Madura foot was found wherever people habitually walked barefoot, but the town of Madurai, not far from Madras, had the dubious honor of lending its name to this disease. No place ever came off well when a disease was named after it: Delhi belly, Baghdad blues, Turkey trots. Madura foot began when a field-worker stepped on a large thorn or nail. Their livelihood gave them no choice but to keep walking, and slowly a fungus overran the foot, invaded bone, tendon, and muscle. Nothing short of amputation would help.
Encouraged by the old surgical saw “Any idiot can amputate a leg,” Ghosh had decided to proceed. If he hesitated, it was because the rest of the saying went “but it takes a skilled surgeon to save one.” Still there was no saving this foot.
The boy was the first patient Ghosh had ever seen who sang and clapped his way into the theater, overjoyed at having surgery. Ghosh cut through skin above the ankle, leaving a flap at the back to cover the stump. He tied off the blood vessels and sawed through the bone and heard the thump of the foot landing in the bucket. It was at this point that the probationer delivered her summons.
Ghosh covered the wound with a damp sterile towel, and he ran home, tearing off his mask and cap, imagining the worst.
He burst into Hema's bedroom, breathless. “What is it?”
Hema, in a silk sari, had spread rice out on the floor. In Sanskrit letters, shed spelled out the boys’ names in the grains. Shiva was in her arms, and Rosina held Marion. Hema had assembled a few Indian women, who were glaring at him in disapproval.
“The post came,” Hema said. “We forgot to do the nama-karanum, Ghosh. Naming ceremony. Should be on the eleventh day, but you can also do it on the sixteenth day. We have not done it on either of those two days, but in my mother's letter she says as long as I do it as soon as I get her aerogram we are all right.”
“You made me leave an operation for this?” He was furious. It was on his lips to say, How can you subscribe to all this witchcraft?
“Look,” Hema hissed, embarrassed by his behavior, “the father is supposed to whisper the child's name into its ear. If you don't want to do it, I'll call someone else.”
That word—”father”—changed