Chapter 19
Wednesday, July 3, 4:15 p.m.
Mitt entered the surgical lounge with the intention of heading directly into the locker room, but then he caught a glimpse of Andrea sitting near the communal coffeepot, using her phone. Pleased to run into her, he immediately changed directions and walked over. She acknowledged him with a nod and a smile but continued her conversation. Mitt could tell it was a personal call, so he took the chair directly opposite hers. While he waited, he took out his own phone to check for any messages and, pleased that there weren’t any, turned off Do Not Disturb mode. A moment later Andrea concluded her call and pocketed her phone. They exchanged a knowing glance. She was back to her fashionista mode, wearing her white coat over an arresting blue dress. As usual she looked a lot more put together than Mitt felt.
“I guess we both missed Journal Club,” Andrea said with a sly smile and a glance at her watch to be certain it wouldn’t be worth heading up to the fifteenth floor. After morning rounds they’d both admitted that with everything else going on the last thing they wanted to do was attend Journal Club, especially since they hadn’t had an opportunity to read any of the designated articles.
“I’d completely forgotten about Journal Club,” Mitt admitted. “How on earth did you remember? Was seeing me a reminder?”
Andrea’s smile morphed into an actual laugh as she hunched her shoulders in a shrug. “Maybe so. Who’s to know?”
“How was your day of surgery?”
“So-so,” Andrea said, holding her hand aloft, palm down, and letting it flutter.
“Don’t tell me you had a bad outcome.”
“Nothing that serious,” Andrea said. “The last case was a Whipple procedure, and I was holding a retractor for almost the entire interminable operation, and like you described with your aneurysm case, for too much of it all I got to see was Dr. Rodriguez’s back. In that sense it was miserable. On the good side, my first two cases were fine, and I did get to do more suturing on all three cases. But enough about me, what about you? How were your cases, and how did you get along with Dr. Singleton?”
“Dr. Singleton is a delight,” Mitt said. “How did you find Dr. Rodriguez?”
“Fine,” Andrea said. “He’s obviously more than competent, but I did get a little spoiled with Dr. Singleton. He’s so much more personable.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” Mitt said, succumbing to a kind of psychogenic blackout. Andrea’s comment had made him revisit Dr. Singleton’s concern about his hallucination in the operating room, which brought back the hallucination itself in shocking detail. Right there in the front of his mind and momentarily blocking out his view of Andrea and the surgical lounge was the taunting blond girl, viciously gesturing toward him with some kind of surgical instrument as she’d done earlier. Behind her and threatening to push past was the bloodied horde of surgerized, tortured souls.
“Mitt, are you all right?” Andrea questioned with a touch of urgency.
Mitt looked down at his knee as he became aware that Andrea had reached out and grasped his leg, awakening him from his disturbing but fleeting trance.
“Yeah, of course,” Mitt responded with a slight shake of his head to clear his mind. “I’m sorry. I just drifted off there for a second.”
“What were you thinking about? You suddenly had this dazed expression.”
“I was just agreeing with what you said about Dr. Singleton,” Mitt said, hunching his shoulders as if to say it was as simple as that. At the same time, he again wrestled with the idea of telling Andrea about his hallucinatory experiences, especially this most recent one, but just as he had on the previous occasion and with Dr. Singleton, he hesitated. Despite the fact that he thought of her as a true, close personal friend and fellow resident going through the same emotionally traumatic experience, he had no idea how she’d take such strange information. The question was whether her loyalty would ultimately be to him or the residency program if she thought he was losing it. As he’d reasoned previously, he wasn’t even sure how he’d respond if the situation were the other way around.
“What’s with these sudden pauses?” Andrea questioned. “You’re acting a bit weird, like you are having a premature senior moment.” She looked at him askance, brows knitted. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine. Really, I’m fine.”
“Okay, I’ll accept that, I suppose.” She rolled her eyes. “Let’s move on! You haven’t mentioned anything about your cases today. Did everything go okay in that department? You didn’t have any more strange deaths that I didn’t hear about, did you?”
“No, no deaths. My cases went okay. Well, that’s not exactly true. There was a problem with the first one. After a vein stripping on a nearly four-hundred-pound woman that went reasonably well, other than not being able to use a planned epidural, the patient wouldn’t start breathing on her own. And then while she was in the PACU, somehow her electrolytes got totally out of whack and she started having extra heartbeats. As far as I know, she’s still on a ventilator six or seven hours after her surgery. Since I did her admission history and physical, I know she had no history of pulmonary disease, and her lungs were perfectly clear last night and presumably this morning. Weird, for sure. Dr. Singleton did say that there are some patients who just go south and there’s nothing to be done. He actually used that specific phrase. Unfortunately for all concerned, the patient is now in the ICU, meaning I have two cases in there.”
“That’s not good.”
“Tell me about it!” Mitt said, rolling his own eyes.
“What about the other two cases you had? Are they okay?”
“Yes. They seem to be doing fine, fingers crossed.” Mitt held up his intertwined fingers for emphasis.
“What were they? Were they the kinds of cases that can have a rocky postop course like my Whipple procedure? I think she’s going to be a challenge for me for the next few days, but I hope she doesn’t cause you any trouble tonight. It’s amazing how much the digestive system is rearranged during a Whipple.”
“I don’t think my two cases are going to be a problem, at least I hope not. They were pretty standard general surgical cases: a breast biopsy with a lymph node dissection and a thyroidectomy for a cancerous nodule. From my perspective in terms of learning surgery, the first procedure was okay, but the second one was a joy, better than any anatomy lesson by a long shot. In fact...”
All of a sudden the memory of the girl and ugly crowd again flashed into Mitt’s mind like a psychic thunderstorm. Only with significant mental effort and another even more obvious shake of his head was he able to dispel it this time.
“In fact, what?” Andrea questioned. She leaned forward, staring into Mitt’s eyes with a questioning expression. “Am I losing you again? What is it with you? Are you okay? Come on, something is bothering you, I can tell.”
“No, no! I’m fine! Really, I’m okay,” Mitt assured her, but he could see she wasn’t convinced. “All right, to be honest, I am still tired, maybe even a bit more so. And I’m definitely still on the anxious side with all these deaths. And to top it all off, I haven’t eaten anything all day. So, after I force myself to descend a floor to the ICU, our least favorite place in the hospital, to look in on both Elena Aguilar and Bianca Perez, I plan to take myself directly to the cafeteria for an early dinner. How about joining me? Are you game?”
“Hell no!” Andrea said but with a smile. “After I check all my postops including today’s, I’m getting the hell out of this hospital. I was just on the phone with a friend. We’re going to have an early but real dinner in a real restaurant. But finish your thought. You were talking about your thyroidectomy, and you started a sentence with ‘in fact’... in fact what?”