The Sisterhood - Michael Palmer [18]
“Thank you,” Evelyn said. “We’ll be in touch.”
CHAPTER III
David Shelton drummed impatiently on the arm of his chair and leafed through a three-month-old issue of The American Journal of Surgery. His excitement and anticipation at making evening rounds with Wallace Huttner had been dulled by a wait that had now grown to nearly three quarters of an hour. Huttner must have encountered unexpected difficulty in the operating room.
For a time David paced through the deserted surgeons’ lounge, closing locker doors—a gesture that seemed, inexplicably, to restore some order to the situation. Forty-five minutes in an empty locker room had hardly been part of his scenario for the evening.
With mounting concern that Huttner might have forgotten their appointment altogether, he took off the suit he had resurrected from the recesses of his closet for the occasion and changed into a set of scrub greens, then slipped paper shoe covers over his scuffed loafers and tucked the black electrical grounding strip in at the back. He considered putting on his own green canvas O.R. shoes, but rejected the notion, fearing that the shoes, a clean, new pair, might give the impression, however accurate, that he had not spent much time in the operating room of late.
The ritual of dressing for the O.R. had an immediate buoying effect on his flagging morale. Donning a paper mask and hair guard, he began absently humming the opening bars of “La Virgen de Macarena,” a melody he had first heard years before, heralding the arrival of the matador at a Mexico City bullfight.
Suddenly he realized what he was singing and laughed out loud. “Shelton, you are really off the wall. Next thing you’ll do is demand two ears and a tail for a successful appendectomy.” Stopping before a mirror, he stuffed several protruding tufts under his cap, then stepped onto the surgical floor.
The Dickenson Surgical Suite, named after the first chief of surgery at the hospital, consisted of twenty-six rooms, devoid of windows, and occupied the entire seventh and eighth floors of the East building. Ubiquitous wall clocks provided the only hint of what life might be doing outside the hospital. In atmosphere, politics, social order, even language, the surgical suite was a world within a world within a world.
From his earliest days as a medical student, and even before, David had dreamed of being a part of that world. He loved the sounds of machines and hushed voices echoing down the gleaming hallways, the tension in hours of meticulous surgery, the seconds of frantic action in a life-or-death crisis. Now, for the second time in his life, the dream was becoming reality.
Scanning the lime-tiled corridor, he saw signs of activity in only two of the operating rooms. The others had been scrubbed down and set up for the first cases of the next morning, then darkened for the night.
He bet himself that Huttner would be working in the room on the right and lost a weekend in Acapulco with Meryl Streep.
“Can I help you?” The circulating nurse met David at the doorway. She wore a wraparound green scrub dress that fell short of concealing her linebacker’s build. Turquoise eyes appraised him from between a paper mask and a cloth, flower-print hair cover.
Assert yourself, David thought. Show some nice, crisp consternation at not being recognized. He was trying to formulate an intimidating response when Huttner looked over from his place at the right side of the table.
“Ah, David, welcome,” he called out. “Edna, that’s Dr. Shelton. Will you get him a riser, please. Put it, ah … over there behind Dr. Brewster.” He nodded toward the resident who was assisting from across the table.
David stepped onto the riser and looked down into the incision.
“Started as a simple oversew of a bleeding ulcer,” Huttner explained, unaware—or, at least, not acknowledging—that he was late for their rounds. “We encountered a little trouble when we got in, though, and I decided to go ahead with a hemigastrectomy and Bilroth anastomosis.” David took note of Huttner