The Sisterhood - Michael Palmer [20]
“I hope so,” David said, his smile a bit forced. “I want you to know how grateful I am for your trust and acceptance. It really means a lot to me personally.”
Huttner brushed the compliment off with his pipe, although his expression suggested that it was expected and would have been missed. “Nonsense, I’m the one who is grateful. It’s a relief to know that my patients will have a bright young Turk like you looking after them while I’m gone. As I recall, you trained at White Memorial, didn’t you?”
“Yes, sir, I was chief resident there once upon a time.”
“I never could seem to get accepted into that program,” Huttner said, shaking his head in what might have been wistfulness. “And it’s ‘Wally.’ I get enough ‘sirs’ every day to fill King Arthur’s Court.”
David nodded, smiled, and stopped himself at the last possible instant from saying, “Yes, sir.”
Huttner bounced to his feet. “A quick shower, then I’ll sign out to you on the floors.” He tossed his scrub suit into a canvas hamper, then took a journal from his locker and handed it to David. “Take a look at this article of mine on radical surgery for metastatic breast disease. I’ll be interested in what you think.”
With that, he strode into the shower room, calling out just before he turned on the water, “You play tennis, David? We have to get together and hit a few before the weather closes in on us.”
“It’s often hard to distinguish between my tennis and my weight lifting,” David said softly enough to be certain Huttner couldn’t possibly have heard. He thumbed through the article. Printed in a rather obscure journal, it advocated radical breast, ovarian, and adrenal surgery for patients with widespread breast cancer. The concept was nothing revolutionary. In certain instances it was accepted. However, as horrible as the disease was, seeing the radical surgical approach laid out in print, scanning the tables of survival, brought a tinge of acid to David’s throat. Survival. Was that really the bottom line? He slapped the journal shut and shoved it back in Huttner’s locker.
The page operator was announcing the eight o’clock end to visiting hours when the two surgeons started making rounds on the floors in the West building. Earlier David had seen the patients he had in the hospital—a ten-year-old boy in for repair of a hernia and Edwina Burroughs, a forty-year-old woman whose factory job and four pregnancies had given her severe varicose veins, gnarled and twisted as the roots of a Banyan tree.
Wallace Huttner had more than twenty-five patients scattered over three different buildings. Almost all of them were recovering from major surgery. On every floor Huttner’s arrival had immediate impact. Horseplay around the nurses’ station stopped. Voices lowered. The charge nurse materialized, charts in hand, to accompany them on their rounds. Replies to Huttner’s occasional questions were either stammered monosyllables or nervous outpourings of excess information. Throughout Huttner maintained an urbane politeness, moving briskly from one bedside to the next without so much as a hint of the fatigue David knew he must be feeling. The man was absolutely one of a kind, he acknowledged to himself. A phenomenon.
Before long, a comfortable pattern had evolved to their rounds. Huttner allowed the charge nurse to lead them to the doorway of a room. Then he took the patient’s chart from her and proceeded to the bedside. David, the charge nurse, and often the staff nurse on the case followed. Next, Huttner handed the unopened chart to David, introduced him to the patient, and gave a capsule history of the initial problem, operative procedure, and subsequent course of treatment, couching details in medical jargon that no one except a physician or nurse could possibly have understood.
Finally he conducted a brief physical examination while David flipped through the record, using a spiral-bound pad to record pertinent lab data as well as Huttner’s overall approach and plan for the case. For the most part, he tried to remain inconspicuous, speaking