clean the wound edges, and over time, fashion a “mitten-hand” that he
might use as a club. His family arrived later by car; it is always difficult to
deliver the sobering news that nothing miraculous can be done to salvage
a limb. But it is only 1996, after all.
Sunday night blurred into Monday morning, which meant Morning
Conference, followed by assisting in the OR during total joint replacement
operations. I still have managed no sleep, and my fatigue is oppressive.
Very few people understand true exhaustion and the consequent short-
circuiting of the brain and bone-deep achiness. I have always performed
well during stretches of sleep deprivation, but at fifty hours, habituation
and willpower start to mean nothing. Wakefulness requires extreme
concentration; alacrity is an impossibility. Like the urge to gag when food-
poisoned or the impulse to squint with a flash of mirrored sunlight, the
mind’s insistence to power down at ultra-weariness means that your body
will collapse, earthward, in a flash, underneath you. In what feels like a
bus crash while you’re napping, the paroxysm of awakening snaps your
head around, your lungs gulping for air, your sea legs stumbling for firm
footing in Wonderland, and your arms reaching for ballast. Often during
residency, this seemingly drug-induced warfare with the primitive part of
my brain (demanding rest, seeking solace, needing, above all else ...
nothing) would happen in the operating room while we were trying to
operate. By dint of a miracle I have made it through a marathon of
surgeries today, and now, as I piece together the events of the weekend, I
remember the final thing I need to do today is to revisit that lumberman
who lost the fingers of his right hand.
Dr. Pellegrini is my chairman, the person who presently controls my
minute-to-minute existence. I’ve come to realize that every episode of the
television show ER and every movie about surgical residents, despite their
best efforts to dramatize the draconian aspects of a chairman and his
residents, vastly undersells the boss’s power and the young medical
doctors’ helplessness and feelings of inadequacy. I meet “The Boss,” as we
call Dr. Pellegrini, and my chief resident Jeff Wood on the fifth floor,
understanding that the patient’s family has now gathered in his room.
Walking down the dark hallway, I am the only one who has been awake for
three days. One night, under similar circumstances of sleep denial, I was
actually falling asleep while walking down an empty hospital corridor,
crashing against the hand rails, stumbling like a frat boy on his way home
marcin
(Marcin)
#1