She adjusted the box full of sawdust under the table with her foot, nudging it to the place where she judged that the blood from the surgery was likeliest to begin dripping. Then, with a glance at O’Reilly and a nod to her dressers, Maya went to work.
She had planned this operation carefully in her mind as she and the patient were in preparation. The position and size of the uterus meant that nothing was straightforward. She took her scalpel and made her incision.
Almost immediately a cry arose from the tiers of “Heads! Heads!” since her own head and body obscured the small incision she had made. She ignored the cry, concentrating on making her cut so that she did not cut across any major vessels. Blood began to trickle down the girl’s hip, onto the oilcloth, to drip into the pan of sawdust beneath the table.
Maya did not get the benefit of having as many dressers and attendants as she wanted; there was no one vying for the honor of holding her instruments or otherwise helping with the operation. There was no one to sponge the sweat from her forehead; hence the strip of toweling. She was not going to go through all the work of sterilizing patient and surface only to have it all ruined by sweat dropping into the open incision and contaminating the site.
She nodded at O’Reilly, who put the ether mask aside and sprayed carbolic over the incision and her hands. He would do this all through the operation, for as long as there was an open wound. The clamor of “Heads!” continued; she continued to ignore it.
“I can’t believe it!” drawled a loud and obnoxiously familiar voice. “She’s not taking the uterus!”
Maya kept herself from jerking around to stare at Simon Parkening in anger and disbelief only by a supreme act of will. That same will kept her hands steady as derisive shouts arose from other lungs. The voices were uniformly unfamiliar; so that was why the theater was so full! Parkening had packed it with his own cronies with the purpose of disturbing the operation!
“Steady, Doctor,” came O’Reilly’s low voice, as a bleat of “Stupid cow!” was aimed at her from the tiers above. “This is aimed at me, not at you.”
“I will be damned,” she replied through gritted teeth, “if I let a pack of piddling puppies interfere with my work!”
But of course it was going to interfere, if only by disturbing her helpers. Twice Maya had to raise her voice to be heard by her dressers over the boos, hisses, and catcalls coming down from above. Her hands started to shake, and she had to stop to steady herself as her impotent anger overwhelmed her own control.
“Now you see why females should never be surgeons!” Simon mocked. “Sentimental! She’s going to kill her patient with sentiment over a fetus! By God, they shouldn’t be allowed to practice medicine at all! They haven’t the nerve for it! Just look at the puny little incision she’s made! Is she afraid of a little blood?”
A burst of laughter followed.
“Not that it would make any difference, one Irish bitch more or less in the world to pour out litters of whelps every year,” Simon continued with an air of casual glee. “They breed like flies anyway.”
Maya actually heard O’Reilly’s teeth grinding.
“Steady, Doctor,” she told him.
But that last comment seemed to have gone a bit far, even for Parkening’s friends. The catcalls died down, and there was an uneasy note to the muttering. “I say—” someone objected weakly. “Out of order, old man.”
Maya had her hands full—literally. She was trying to locate the appendix by feel, through an incision too small for the pregnant uterus to bulge through. There were whispers of “What’s she doing?” that she ignored completely, deciding at last to trust to instinct—and a little magic. She willed the thing to come into her fingers, concentrating a trickle of power into her hands, thinking of the diseased organ as an enemy that was trying to escape her. It’s there, somewhere… hot, diseased… like the polluted soil outside my house.
She sensed it now, a swollen malevolence lurking beneath her fingers. Concentrating all her will on it, the hecklers and the theater receded to a mere whisper of annoyance in the background, inconsequential as the buzzing of a fly on a windowpane. She used her anger as power, poured it into her questing fingers. Into my hands, damn you.
Then, suddenly, she got a tip of her finger on it. It felt so hot it seemed to burn her hand, but she twisted her fingers after it, caught it, and slid it carefully into view in the center of the incision.
Triumph! At last she had the damned thing! And it hadn’t burst, though its inflamed, swollen condition warned that it could, at any moment. She secured it with her left hand and held out her right.
“Clamp,” she muttered; for a miracle, her dresser heard her, and the clamp slapped into her outstretched hand.
Within moments, the offending organ resided in the tray of sawdust at the foot of the table, and she was in the process of suturing the incision shut while O’Reilly madly sprayed the last of the carbolic over hands, incision, and anything else that happened to fall in his path.
Done! She stepped back from the table; her dressers swabbed up the last of the blood with sponges, and covered the incision with clean sticking plaster. A wave of exhaustion threatened; she drove it back and turned to gaze up at the theater full of now-silent onlookers.
She was still so angry that her vision was blurred. She couldn’t make out faces—but she sensed Simon Parkening to her left, and deliberately focused her attention slightly to the right, away from him, as if he was of no consequence to her.
“I direct the attention of you gentlemen to the plaques upon the wall, behind me there,” she said, in a voice that dripped ice and scorn. “I assume, that since you who are medical students are all learned gentlemen, your Latin and Greek will extend to reading and understanding them. And in case your eyesight is faulty, I will tell you that the first reads, Miseratione non Mercede while the second is the Oath of Hippocrates. I suggest that you might benefit by taking them both to heart.” She paused, while utter silence fell over the group. “And for those of you who were not capable of conning your Latin and Greek at University, I will translate the first, which means, From compassion, not for gain. I would take that to remind us that even those who cannot pay are to be treated here as equal to those whose deaths would make a stir in the world. As for the second—” Her gaze swept the room, blindly. “I think you will find an injunction both to do no harm and to respect the wishes of the patient. For the rest, I suggest you apply to someone who has made the effort to learn the language of our legendary forefather.”
That said, she nodded to the dressers, who transferred the still-unconscious girl to the wheeled stretcher, and walked to the basin to wash her bloody hands and arms.
There’s a couple in your eye, Parkening—and you can’t claim I singled you out either.
There was not a single sound except for retreating footsteps echoing hollowly on the risers, as she washed, rinsed, and dried her hands, then took off the apron and dropped it on the floor to be collected and washed. Nor did she again turn to look at the retreating students. Her anger sustained and kept her head erect and her spine straight as she walked into the antechamber and shut the door.
Her patient was already gone, taken back to the ward. Hopefully, she would not start an infection. Hopefully, she would not have a miscarriage. Hopefully, the incision would be healed by the time she went into labor.