“This good news of yours turns me on.”
“Oh?” Noah commented innocently. He wasn’t sure he had heard correctly, or if he had, what he should do.
Ava solved Noah’s immediate dilemma by standing up, and to Noah’s surprise peeled off her blouse and dropped her jeans. She stood before him in a dark green, incredibly sexy bra-and-panties outfit the likes of which Noah had never seen, covering the least amount of dermatological acreage he thought possible. She sauntered over to Noah, who was momentarily paralyzed, and sat on the arm of his chair. He was dazzled by her pheromones.
“You know what I think we should do with all this good news?” she asked in the same husky voice.
“I’m beginning to get an idea,” Noah said, more than willing to play the game.
“Let’s make love right here, right now!”
An hour later, they were lying in Ava’s king-size bed, gazing up at the ceiling with Oxi and Carbi curled up at the foot. Although feeling great, Noah was struggling to stay awake after having gotten up that morning at 4:00 A.M. and working all day.
“I have to admit something,” Ava said suddenly. “I’m totally jealous of your Ivy League education. What a thrill it must have been for you to go to Columbia, MIT, and Harvard. I can’t imagine how proud you must be. And getting a Ph.D. like you did in just two years. It is remarkable.”
“I was lucky,” Noah said. “At the same time, I worked my butt off.”
“I wish I had had the opportunity,” Ava said wistfully. “Being here at the BMH, I feel embarrassed at having gone to such an unknown school. It seems that most everyone around here trained at a name institution like you.”
“I’m impressed with what you have been able to do,” Noah said sincerely. “I looked at your educational background on LinkedIn and learned you were in a combined six-year college and medical school program. In many ways, it’s more impressive than what I’ve done. My path was clear from middle school on. You said you weren’t motivated to go to college. What changed your mind?”
“Working for the dentist,” Ava said. “It made me realize I wasn’t going anyplace fast and that I’d be doing the same thing for the rest of my life. It was a rude awakening. Luckily, my boss, Dr. Winston Herbert, was recruited to start a dental program at Brazos University in 2001, which he did in 2002. Brazos U was a new school formed in the mid-nineties in Lubbock that was growing by leaps and bounds. They had started a medical school a few years later. Dr. Herbert brought me along with him when he became dean of the dental school, so I was in reality working for the university. Of course, he was taking advantage of me at the time, despite his being married and all.”
“I’m sorry,” Noah said. He felt anger at the thought of a man sexually abusing a teenager.
“It’s water over the dam,” Ava said. “I’m not bitter. In fact, I’m thankful. I wouldn’t be where I am today if it hadn’t been for Dr. Herbert. Being part of a growing university opened my eyes to so many things. And he was encouraging right from the start. He even started my interest in anesthesia.”
“Really?” Noah questioned. “How was that?”
“Dentists often can be very cavalier about anesthesia,” Ava said. “They feel comfortable using it in their offices without the kind of backup I demand now. And he let me do it almost from day one. Here I was giving anesthesia at age eighteen, knowing almost nothing about it. It terrifies me now when I think back, but I was fascinated by it. It’s what prompted me to go to college and then medical school. When I barely managed to graduate from Coronado High School, I never in a million years thought I’d go on to any form of formal education.”
“How did you manage, moneywise? Did your family help?” Noah asked.
Ava gave a short mocking laugh. “Not in the slightest. I never got along with my father.”
“Well, that’s another way we’re alike. I never got along with mine, either.”
“My mother remarried after my father died, but her new husband and I were like oil and water. I was on my own right after high school. Working for Dr. Herbert and the university was what made it all possible. I worked for him whenever I could throughout college and medical school.”
“What were you like as a child?” Noah asked. Though they shared a commitment to medicine, it was apparent to him that early on they were very different people. Once he’d seen the light in the first years of high school, he’d been overly committed to education and becoming a surgeon. It had consumed him, and it still did.
“I really don’t like talking about my past,” Ava said firmly. “It brings back too many painful memories. I’d much prefer to talk about the future. Or better still, your past.”
“What would you like to know?” Noah said.
“Everything,” Ava said. She pushed herself up on an elbow and looked at Noah. “I know we were born the same year, 1982. When I put it all together, I’m missing two years in your history.”
“You continue to impress me,” he said. “You’re correct. Medical school took me six years rather than the usual four. During my second year my mother got sick and had to leave her job, which was supporting me and my disabled sister. I had to get a job. Luckily, I got a job with the medical school so I could stay involved by attending lectures. When my mother passed away, I was able to rematriculate and finish medical school.”
“I’m sorry,” Ava said. “That must have been a struggle.”
“Like you said earlier, it’s water over the dam. You do what you have to do.”
“And tell me more about your Ph.D. thesis in genetics from MIT,” Ava said. “That’s really impressive. I’ve never heard of someone getting a Ph.D. so quickly. How on earth did you manage it?”
“It sounds more impressive than it was,” Noah said. “I had started it as an undergraduate project in bacterial reproduction, so I had a jump on it. But to be honest, I didn’t do it for the purest intentions. I did it with the hopes it would get me into Harvard Medical School, which it did. I was scared; when I’d finished my undergraduate degree in biology, I was turned down by both Columbia and Harvard Medical School. I knew I had to do something out of the ordinary.”
“You’re just being modest,” Ava said.
“I don’t think so,” Noah said. “I even fudged on it a bit, at least initially. But that’s another story.”
“What do you mean?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Noah said. “The whole project was more busy work than a real breakthrough, and in that sense somewhat of an embarrassment.”
“Sounds imposterish, if I can coin a new term, just like we were talking about last night.”
Noah pointed at Ava’s nose and said with a laugh, “Very clever. You got me! I suppose I am kind of a Ph.D. imposter.”
19
MONDAY, JULY 24, 2:35 P.M.
“For your first endoscopic gallbladder removal, that was well done, Mark,” Noah said to Dr. Mark Donaldson in operating room 24. Mark had just withdrawn the gallbladder out of one of the four tiny endoscopic incisions in the patient’s abdomen. The second-year resident had done a commendable job, and Noah knew it was important for him to be told. When one was a junior resident, praise from a senior, especially a super chief, was critical when it was deserved just as much as criticism when that was appropriate.
“Thank you, Dr. Rothauser,” Mark said while handing off the small, diseased organ to the scrub nurse. He then visibly relaxed a degree, as he had been tense through the entire hourlong procedure. Noah also relaxed. He, too, had been tense with the instruments mostly out of his hands, certainly more tense than if he had been doing the procedure himself. It was part of the strain of teaching surgery. Both residents were looking at the monitor, which gave them a good view of the raw gallbladder bed under the edge of the liver.