The Sisterhood - Michael Palmer [23]
“So, are you with our lady Charlotte again?” Huttner asked, oblivious to the silent meeting that was taking place.
“Huh? Oh, yes.” Christine broke the connection and turned to Huttner. “She’s not looking too well. I asked to bring the coffee in because I wanted to talk to you about …”
“How rude of me,” Huttner interrupted. “Miss Beall this is Dr. David Shelton. Perhaps you two have met?
“No,” Christine said icily. She was well acquainted with Huttner’s lack of regard for the insights and suggestions of nurses. Over the years she had given up even attempting to share hers with him. But Charlotte’s situation was distressing enough for her to try. If Huttner would only agree to let up on his aggressive treatment, to cancel the resuscitation order, she might not intervene even if the Screening Committee approved her proposal. So she had tried, and predictably the man had cut her off—this time with an inane social amenity. Still, she felt determined to speak her mind. It was his tube that was sticking into Charlotte’s nose. His order to prolong her suffering no matter what. He could play puppet-master with his other patients, but not with Charlotte. He would listen or … or have his strings to her cut. Christine swallowed the bone of anger that had begun sticking in her throat.
Huttner took no note of the chill in her voice. “Dr. Shelton will be covering all my patients, including Mrs. Thomas, for a few days,” he said.
Christine nodded at David and wondered whether he might have the authority to back off on Huttner’s overzealous approach to Charlotte, then realized there was no chance the surgical chief would permit that. “Dr. Huttner,” she said flatly, “I would like to talk to you about Charlotte for a few minutes.”
Huttner glanced at his watch. “That would be fine, Miss Beall,” he said. “Why don’t you let us finish reviewing Charlotte’s case and examining her. Then you can go over things with Dr. Shelton here. He’ll know exactly what I want for this woman.” Huttner looked away before the first of the daggers from her eyes reached him. David shrugged his embarrassment, but Christine had already turned on one heel and left the room.
Huttner took a sip of coffee, then began speaking without so much as a word or gesture toward the nurse who had just left. “Mrs. Thomas is a registered nurse. In her late fifties, I think.” David glanced at the birth-date on the chart. She was nearly sixty-one. “Her husband, Peter, is a professor at Harvard. Economics. She was referred to me by an internist because of a suspected cancer of the rectum. Several weeks ago, I performed a Miles’s resection on the woman. The tumor was an adenocarcinoma extending just through the bowel wall.
“However, all the nodes I took were negative. I feel there’s a very good chance that my clean-out may have gotten the whole thing.”
David looked up from the coffee stain he was absently erasing with his thumb. The five-year survival rate after removal of a rectal cancer with such extension was under 20 percent. A chance? Certainly. A “very good chance”? He leaned back and wondered if it was worth asking Huttner to clarify the reasons for his optimism. It would not, he decided, be wise to question him about anything.
Comfortable in the blanket of his own words, Huttner continued his presentation. “As always seems to happen when we work on nurses or doctors, everything that could have gone sour postoperatively seems to have done so. First, a pelvic abscess—I had to go back in and drain it. Next, a pneumonia. And then a nasty decubitus ulcer over her sacrum. Yesterday she developed signs of a bowel obstruction and I had to slip down a tube. That seems to be correcting the problem, and I have a feeling that she may have turned the corner.”
Huttner folded his hands on the table in front of him, indicating that his presentation was done. An almost