Home > After the Rain(13)

After the Rain(13)
Author: Renee Carlino

“We have to open her up,” I said.

Every nurse and doctor went into motion the moment the words came out of my mouth. Within seconds trays were shoved in front of me with surgical instruments of every kind. The smell of iodine was heavy in the room, even through my mask. The sound of the saw piercing Lizzy’s sternum was like nails on a chalkboard. I had never had an emotional reaction to the gruesomeness of surgery until that moment. Everything about what I was doing seemed wrong. Cranking the spreaders to pull her bone and tissue apart took more effort than usual, and I had to cauterize several leaking ends from the breastbones. I gagged behind my mask at the smell of the vaporized blood and bone. Lizzy’s beautiful chest was peeled apart and spread open, revealing a nightmare about to unfold.

To my absolute shock and horror, her entire chest cavity was full of blood. Like in a dream, my hands and arms moved slower than my brain. “Suction!” I kept yelling, but I couldn’t find the source of the bleeding. Seconds felt like days. “Fuck! Suction, goddammit!”

“She’s crashing,” someone said calmly.

“I’m trying,” I said through gritted teeth. I was doing everything right. I couldn’t understand what was happening and why it was happening so fast. I began running through long procedural lists in my head. Had I checked every possible source, I wondered? I continued barking orders at the team.

Twenty minutes later, a fellow surgeon told me it was over. I called the time of death with Lizzy’s heart still warm in my hands.

The first face I saw when I left the operating room was my father’s. He put his hands on his hips, which forced his overweight Hawaiian-print-clad belly to protrude from his lab coat. He pointed to the waiting room at the end of the hall and said, “Go tell the mother and then meet me in my office.”

Was he mad? I had just lost my first patient, a beautiful fifteen-year-old girl who’d had the rest of her life ahead of her.

I swallowed back anger. “You’re not going to apologize to me?”

“Apologize for what?”

“This is fucking tragic,” I said in a frantic voice.

“Keep your voice down,” he barked back at me, but it was too late. I had already gotten the attention of Lizzy’s mother, who was watching me through a wall of glass from the waiting room. My father leaned over and in a quiet and calm voice said, “It wasn’t a tragedy, it was a mistake—that you made. I read the chart. You misdiagnosed her.”

Shocked, I stared blankly at the wall behind him. I couldn’t blink my eyes. They were dried out and stuck open, and my heart was beating out of my chest. Thoughts began swirling frantically in my head. I was a terrible surgeon. I was a fuckup. I was a murderer.

“Why didn’t you stop me?” I whispered. I still couldn’t look him in the eye.

“Because you were so goddam anxious to get in that O.R., I didn’t have the time.”

I heard a cry from the waiting room. I watched as Meg, Lizzy’s mother, fell to the floor, sobbing. Somehow she knew; she could see we weren’t discussing good news.

I left my father, ran to her, and knelt by her side. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t . . . I tried.” Tears made their way to the front of my eyes and spilled over. I reached out and took her in my arms and rocked her back and forth for several moments while she screamed out, “No!” over and over in loud sobs.

When I felt Steve’s hands pulling me up, I looked into his tearstained eyes and said, “I’m so sorry.” My voice was trembling unprofessionally and laced with sadness and guilt.

He didn’t respond, he just pulled his shattered wife into his chest and walked out the door of the waiting room. I looked down to see my father still standing at the end of the hall, looking unemotional and stoic. I couldn’t face him.

I left the hospital and went to my apartment where I stayed for six days without speaking to a soul. My father rang the doorbell on a Sunday afternoon.

When I opened it, he gave me a pitying smile before walking past me into the living room. “It wasn’t entirely your fault, Nate.” I sunk down on the couch and watched him walk around, opening the blinds. “Son, you are the hardest-working person I know. Please don’t be discouraged. This is part of the deal. Every doctor makes mistakes and every doctor loses patients. We’re humans and we’re flawed. That girl needed a heart transplant, not percutaneous closure. Who knows if she would have made it long enough to get one.”

“You mean, if I hadn’t killed her?”

He stood over me as I stared at my fidgeting hands. “I put you in for leave.”

“What? Why?” I said with no expression on my face.

“I made an executive call. You were getting a little cocky, Nate.”

“You’re punishing me for losing a patient?”

He sat down next to me. “Look around this place. This is where you live? You’re almost thirty years old and you haven’t purchased any décor for a house you’ve lived in for five years, not even a television?”

“I’m never here.”

“You’re always at the hospital.”

“Your point being?”

“It’s not healthy.”

“Okay, so now what? You want me to take time off and decorate my apartment?”

“I called your Uncle Dale.”

“Why?”

“You’re taking a month off. I’ve got your patients covered. Son, look at me. . . .”

   
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