Wednesday March 16th, 2016

The exercise:

Write about: the surgeon.

Quiet night at work. I actually got to my car at 9:01, which I thought was pretty good. Managed to do most of the end of night stuff without consulting my list - it's so much easier doing this regularly like this. I think the schedule for the next couple of weeks gets figured out tomorrow and I'm hoping for more of the same.

Took Max to his final music class of this session this morning before running a couple errands with him afterward. I'll just say that class did a fine job of winding him up. At least he was still more or less cooperative... he just needed a lot of reminders.

Mine:

I look over my appointment book for the ninth or tenth time in the last five minutes. The door to my office is closed, the blinds are drawn over the window overlooking the parking lot. I've turned off my computer monitor, leaving only the lamp in the corner to light the room. There is nothing to distract me from the list of upcoming procedures.

I'm due in surgery in an hour. It's a routine operation, one I've done countless times. After that there's a half hour break and then three more patients due to go under the knife. My knife. Nothing too complicated. The most challenging part will likely be remembering to count all of my instruments before sewing them up again.

Can't be leaving another forceps inside a patient. The Chief of Medicine would be all over me for that.

Voices in the hallway draw my attention for a moment. Loud enough for me to hear, too quiet for me to understand. In a different mood I would imagine the topic and improv the dialogue. Maybe something about comparing the length of their nose hairs. Not today.

I check my watch. Reread the appointment list. Bite my lip. Drum my fingers on my desk.

Screw it. There's enough time.

I turn on my monitor and double-click on the World of Warcraft icon.

2 comments:

Greg said...

That music class doesn't sound good – or perhaps its too good? I get the impression from your understatement that Max wasn't happy by the end of it. You should probably stop having him learn classical harp... :-P
I'm very glad I'm not a patient of your surgeon: someone who's reliving how his Orc Chieftain just died in a raid is not someone I want with their hands inside me looking for organs to remove. I do like the way you lead up to the WoW moment though, especially the notes about the surgeon imagining other people's conversations when they're too indistinct for the words to be made out.

The surgeon
A is for Anaesthesiologist.
Got one of those, he's sitting in the corner. Nice guy, not long out of med. school. Talks quietly to the patients while they're asleep because he's worried that they might be slightly awake, so he tells them reassuring things and pretty much drones on about his life. If they were awake he'd put them straight back under through boredom, so I let him carry on and do it.

B is for Bald.
Got one of those too, though it's not by choice. Mine or theirs. She's been bald for the last two weeks since her girlfriend got jealous and shaved her hair off while she was asleep; it's growing back but painfully slowly and she keeps complaining about how it itches. Her eyebrows are missing this morning so I'm guessing the cats are still fighting back home. I'd rather not have her in here at all but that's because she showers irregularly and her breath is abattoir-bad. However, she's still got the neatest stitches of any of my trainees and the hospital are insisting that I take more minorities (is being a lesbian really something to get upset about in an operating theatre?) so she's in.

C is for Cutter.
Junior Surgeon Arnold Cutter to be precise, but it seems to be one of those cases of nominative determinism. He's good, and getting better. He started off like the guy from Big Bang Theory, but after I replaced his scissors with pinking shears and his bone saw with wood rasp he had his little hissy fit and started to loosen up. There was the small matter of the lawsuit as well, but I defended him and swore blind that it was the nurse with the buckteeth who'd done those things and one dismissal later we're all one big, happy family again.

D is for Death.
That would be me.

Marc said...

Greg - no, I meant wound up as in full of energy. He quite enjoys the class. It's just afterward he wanted to run around stores and get into everything, so it was a bit of a challenge.

Enjoyed your alphabet format. You lulled me into expecting one thing and then dropped the bomb on me at D. Very nicely done. Especially liked C.

I was going to say 'Especially liked your C section' and then decided not to... until I had to get it out anyway, apparently.