by Anthony Youn
“Can you not!” Tim glares at Shelly, his eyes glazed.
“You look green,” I say.
“You should eat something,” Shelly says to Tim, chewing with her mouth open.
“Jesus,” Tim says. He presses his palm into his forehead, mops up a lake of sweat.
“He’s squeamish,” I say.
“A tad,” Tim says.
“He’s not that great with his hands, either,” I say.
“I flunked shop class in high school. I have stone fingers.” In misery, he pushes away his orange juice. “How am I gonna get through this?”
“Tell them you’re gonna be a shrink,” Shelly says.
“Oh, that’s a good idea,” Tim says. “Then Intern Dan, that hottie, will flunk me out of my surgery rotation, and I’ll end up doing my residency at Cal State Magic Mountain.”
“I could be a surgeon,” I say.
“Oh, in a heartbeat,” Shelly says. “It’s so sexy.”
“My father would be overjoyed. I’m not orthopedic material, though.”
“True, dat,” Shelly says. “You need more bulk, mister. They would not let you into their little jock fraternity. You’re not their type.”
“I know. I’m just a scrawny Asian nerd.”
“You’re not scrawny,” Tim says. He shivers, moans, and lowers his head onto the table, his reflection weaving in the orange juice glass.
. . . .
ORIENTATION GOES ON for eight hours. Shelly claims a seat in the front row, takes copious notes, asks thoughtful questions, and ass-kisses everyone in sight. Tim hides out in the back, a mute for the day, rocking his head in his hands, fighting to remain upright in the darkened room. I sit behind Shelly, watch, learn, memorize six basic rules—
• We must change into scrubs before crossing a large red line on the floor separating the OR from the rest of the world. I fear that this line is electrified and will fry anyone who dares to cross in street clothes.
• We must wash our hands for at least five minutes before each surgery with a special antibacterial soap that not only kills every germ floating anywhere near your flesh but chafes your skin until it resembles reptile hide buffed with an electric sander.
• We must wear goggles. Wraparound welder’s glasses similar to the ones we strapped on in shop class. This causes Tim a painful high school memory of attempting to make a wallet.
• We must familiarize ourselves with the surgery we will attend. If we walk in unprepared, the resident or attending surgeon will humiliate us, abuse us, and then boot us out of the OR.
• We must learn to keep our hands above our waist at all times. This restricted area above the belt is known in the OR as the sterile field. The moment you inadvertently or surreptitiously drop your hands out of the field, I expect lights to flash, alarms to blare, guards to appear. If you have a sudden uncontrollable urge to itch below the belt, don’t. Bite your lip and suck it up.
• Finally, and most important, we must learn how to stand during surgery. Never lock your knees while standing in the operating room. This increases your chances of fainting, swooning, falling, and smashing your head on the floor, or worse, fainting and falling face-first into the patient’s cut-open belly. It has happened.
. . . .
THE NIGHT AFTER orientation, my father calls. “General surgery good, no?”
“I don’t know, Dad. It’s early. The first day. I have to think about it.”
“Think about what? What else you do? Huh?”
“No, it’s great. But I also like the idea of family practice—”
I may as well have said that I like the idea of becoming a serial killer.
“Family practice? Work all day, all night, weekend, make no money. Go broke! Surgery only thing. Psychiatry? No. Too many crazy people. Pediatrics? No. Little kids, little dollah. Surgery! One proceejah, two thousand dollah!”
“You make a lot of sense. I’ll definitely think about it.”
“Fine. Think. Then do surgery. Trust Daddy.”
I hang up, wondering how many other sons actually disappoint their fathers by becoming doctors.
FOR THE NEXT several weeks I accompany Intern Dan during a series of brief, uninteresting, even dull surgeries. He snips flesh for biopsies, removes appendices, repairs hernias, drains cysts. Nothing approaching sexy. One day, though, halfway through the rotation, he offers me the ultimate treat.
“Tomorrow morning,” he whispers low. “The Whipple.” He pauses reverentially.
I nod dumbly like I’m new to English. I’ve never heard of the Whipple.
“You don’t have to attend.” Dan snorts. “Totally optional.”
“Oh, no, no, I definitely want to attend.”
“Good answer.” Dan chucks me under the chin and backs down the corridor, shooting me with a finger pistol.
That night I read about the Whipple procedure, known formally as a pancreaticoduodenectomy, daunting doctor-speak for the removal of the pancreas and duodenum in patients who have cancers of the gastrointestinal tract. Finally, a meaningful surgery. I’m psyched. What I don’t find out until the following morning when I’m about to scrub up is that a typical Whipple surgery takes nine hours.
“Did you say nine hours?” I ask this casually of Keisha, a nurse who looks like Samuel L. Jackson in a dress.
“Did you not notice on the scheduling board that the OR has been booked out all day? Did you not pick that up?”
“I did,” I say. “I just wanted to confirm.”
“Uh-huh. Well, I run this show. So listen to me. You’re looking at nine hours minimum. Usually more like ten. No recess, no lunch, no bladder breaks. And I hope you’re wearing comfortable shoes.” She claps her hands with a sudden ferocious crack. I jump two feet. “Let’s go!”
She herds me toward the OR, pulling up at the red line as if it’s a force field. “Drop your pager on my desk,” she says. I hand it over like I’ve been caught holding a bottle of water by airport security. She places my pager at the edge of her blotter. “I hope you turned it off. Because if your pager beeps during these nine hours?” Keisha opens a desk drawer. She reaches in and pulls out a pair of scissors the size of gardening shears. They gleam like razors. “I will read your page aloud, and then I will cut the cord on your pants. You can finish the surgery in your skivvies or nekked. I don’t care. Am I clear?”
I nod like a three-year-old.
Keisha faces me, telescopes me with her eyes. She sees something that troubles her. Guilt? Fear? Insurgency? Whatever she sees, she wants to trample it. She snaps the metal jaws of the scissors shut with a clang. “You understand, Mr. Youn?”
“Yes, sir. I mean, ma’am.”
She eases the scissors onto the desk next to my pager, sits down first with a shimmy and then a thud, and begins to chart the surgery, eyeing me all the way.
She’s right.
She saw something.
She saw a petrified medical student picturing himself standing for nine hours in unspeakably embarrassing underwear.
I pray that I’ve turned off my pager because there is an excellent chance that Amy will page me. We can’t go nine hours without contacting each other. We’re brimming over with immeasurable amounts of lovey-dovey nonsense that we must communicate. And since I can’t get to my pager because of the Whipple, she will page me.
It’s what she will say that unnerves me. Our pages vary from cute and funny to cute, funny, and pornographic. I can live with cute and funny.
In my mind, I hear my pager beeping. I see Keisha reading my page to herself, slowly shaking her head, then reading Amy’s off-color message aloud. I see her lifting herself up from her chair, folding her fingers into the scissors, snapping the menacing metal mouth in the air, walking toward me, bearing down, and cutting the cord that holds up my pants, revealing my—
Joe Boxer underwear. A gift from Amy. Yellow cotton fabric, soft, cozy, covered entirely by Joe Boxer’s big smiley cartoon face, little tongue poking up in the corner.<
br />
From the Joe Boxer collection called Mr. Licky.
I’m a dead man.
THE WHIPPLE SURGERY begins. The attending physician and chief resident take their places on opposite sides of the patient’s abdomen. The junior resident and Intern Dan set up at the patient’s thighs. I’m kicked down to the foot of the operating table, where I’m blocked by their six-feet-four-inch frames and am able to see absolutely nothing. I think about the next nine hours. What fun. I just have to keep my hands above my waist, try to squeeze my head in or around these human tree limbs so I can see something, and pretend to care. Most of all, pray that Amy forgets to page me.
Twenty minutes in, Intern Dan decides that this Whipple might in fact be his moment, his time to shine in front of the attending physician. He must take charge of me, young Mr. Medical Student, for whom he somehow wrangled an invitation to this private party, and use this operation as a teaching opportunity. Dan, serious, his low murmur filled with gravity, begins quizzing me about surgical anatomy to see if I’ve done my Whipple reading. I have. I answer each question. I see what he’s doing. He’s trying to look good and trip me up at the same time. Feels like I’m a pledge in a fraternity. We have a name for this line of questioning. We call it pimping. In med school, we have two types of pimping. Pimping meant to teach, we call benign. Pimping meant to humiliate, we call malignant. I’ll call Dan’s pimping stage five malignant.
Two hours in. Everyone’s sweating except me. Thankfully, Dan’s run out of questions, or I’ve frustrated him by knowing the answers. He’s gone silent, stony. And with seven hours to go, I still haven’t seen much action except for a couple of brief exciting moments of blood and guts. Feels like a waste of time. I begin to drift—
Ten days ago.
I’m on call. My trauma pager goes off. I race out of the call room and meet Dr. Z in the hallway. We blast through the double doors leading into the ER and rush to the trauma bay, where we meet the trauma bay doc, Dr. A.
“Twofer,” Dr. A says. “Drunk driver broadsided a retired firefighter. Both in bad shape. I’ll take the driver.”
Dr. Z and I gown and glove up. I assist him as he works on saving the firefighter’s life. Next to us, Dr. A attends the drunk driver, who pelts us with nonstop obscenities and vicious laughter. I concentrate on doing anything I can to help Dr. Z save the firefighter. After a couple of hours, Dr. Z knows there is nothing more he can do. The firefighter succumbs to a massive hemorrhage from a torn aorta. Shaken, Dr. Z calls the time of death and retreats to speak to the firefighter’s family members, who have gathered in the waiting room. The drunk driver survives. He screams for higher doses of pain medication. When we refuse, he threatens to call an attorney. At one point he hollers at a nurse to bring him a beer.
I want to punch him in the face. I round on him the next morning. He continues to scream for meds and verbally abuse the nurses. As we prepare to discharge him, I find Dr. Z.
“I need to ask you something. What happens when we discharge him? Can we call the police to pick him up? He committed murder.”
“We can’t do anything,” he says.
“It’s ridiculous,” I say. “It’s unfair.”
“Tony, we’re not cops, and we’re not judges. Our job is to provide medical care. Period. Doesn’t matter if a patient is a scumbag.”
“But doesn’t it bother you?”
“A lot. But the more you do trauma, the more you see these things, and the less they affect you. I’m not proud of admitting that, it’s just true.”
Lying in the call room the next night, I know that the field of general surgery will burn me out. I’m too emotional to deal with the intensity of trauma and other life-and-death surgical procedures on a regular basis. My emotions would cloud my judgments. I would’ve gone after that drunk driver. I would’ve called the police. I would’ve—I don’t know what I would’ve done, really—but I know I could never be as cool, objective, and detached as Dr. Z.
Sorry, Dad, I’m just not made for general surgery.
Now, who can I get to tell him?
“Retractor!” the chief resident growls through his mask. “Dan, hold the retractor!”
Back at the Whipple, someone slaps a steel tool resembling a pair of pliers into Dan’s hands. He fastens the retractor in place onto the patient, holding back the edges of the surgeon’s incisions so that the attending doctor can get a better look at the patient’s insides.
“You hold it in place, Tony,” Dan whispers. “Keep your hands steady.”
Since nobody’s moving to make room for me, I snake between Dan and the chief resident, crouch so that I’ve got a good angle, grab the retractor, and stay locked in that position for the next two hours. Despite being almost on top of the action, I see nothing.
Then it happens.
About an hour into my crucial retractor holding, my pager goes off.
The beep echoes through the operating room. Nobody speaks.
“What is that?”
The chief resident. His gruff voice roars through his mask.
“Tony?” Keisha taps my pager on her desk. She doesn’t even try to disguise the wave of malicious joy that’s seeped into her voice.
“Yes, see, ah.” I’ve momentarily lost the ability to form actual English sentences. “That would be my pager. I forgot to turn it off. I’m very, very sorry.”
“Who would be paging you in the OR?” The resident. This is the first time he’s turned in my direction. The only time he’s acknowledged my existence.
“I’m sure it’s my, you know, girlfriend. It’s not important.”
Keisha snorts. “I told him if his pager goes off, I’m gonna cut off his pants.”
She slides the scissors out of her drawer. She rubs her meaty palm over the blade.
Everyone laughs. The tension in the room leaves.
“Where did you get those?” the chief resident says, a nod toward the scissors. “Looks like a murder weapon.”
“Oh, yeah.” Keisha laughs.
“Read the page,” the attending physician says. “Aloud.”
My neck goes hot. “I really don’t think—” I squeak.
“I’d love to,” Keisha says. She clears her throat for effect. She holds my pager up to eye level and pauses as she first reads Amy’s message to herself. “Aw. This is so sweet. Very touching. Hey, Hot Buns, you bringing the hot dog tonight?”
I nearly drop the retractor into the patient’s stomach cavity. The other doctors, and Keisha, lose it.
“Oh, man,” the chief resident says. “I’m crying.”
“We’d better be quiet or we’ll wake up the patient,” the attending physician says.
“I think I should snip his pants so we can get a look at that hot dog,” Keisha says. She snaps the scissors open.
“Guys,” I beg. “Please.” The last thing I need is for them to see my smiling Mr. Licky Joe Boxers.
“Feels like he’s got something to hide,” Keisha says.
“My hand’s sweaty,” I say. “I don’t want to drop the retractor into her stomach.”
A second of silence, then another outburst.
“Good one, Tony,” the resident says. “Okay, people, back to work.”
Instantly, we’re back to business. Except for holding the retractor for another hour, I am forgotten.
That night, after standing through ten hours of Whipple surgery, I unwind with a beer at Amy’s apartment.
“So, how was the Whipple?” she asks me. “Did it really take nine hours?”
“Ten,” I say. “Ten unbelievably boring hours.”
“Something exciting had to happen in all that time. Spill.”
“Nope,” I say, sipping my beer. “Absolutely nothing.”
IT’S AT THIS point in our relationship, seven months in or so, that I start to feel tiny, intermittent drips of uncertainty. In lonely moments in the call room, leafing through issues of Cosmo so old and worn that the covers crack, I bombard myself with questions: Are w
e moving too fast? Too slow? Are we too comfortable with each other? Are we too good to be true?
And the biggest question of all—
Does she love me?
I love her. I know that. She knows that. I think. I’m pretty sure. I’ve never actually told her I love her, and she’s never said she loves me, but—
Yes, but. Therein lies that drip . . . drip . . . drip . . . of doubt. Does she feel the same about me? What if she likes me a lot but doesn’t quite love me the way I love her. What then? Where are we then?
I take action. I decide we need an intimate overnight away from here. But where? I ask the maven of all things romantic.
“So you want to shack up for the night?” Tim says.
“Well, yeah, I was thinking somewhere discreet, quiet, romantic.”
“I’m picturing candles, soft music, incense, hot tub in the room.”
“Exactly. That’s what I’m talking about. Do you know any place?”
“Hi Dee Ho Motel. Grayson and Fifth, downtown. Ask for a Jacuzzi suite. They have a student special every Monday night. Thirty-nine bucks, including tax, cash only. I’m told.”
“Is it nice?”
“I hear it’s quite nice. I’ve personally never been.”
“Really. Kinda sounds like you’ve been.”
“Never.” He snaps off his reading lamp. “Mention my name, they’ll comp you on the Magic Fingers.”
The following Monday night, I whisk Amy away from the grind and intensity of our everyday lives and head off for our romantic getaway. We make a pact. For the next twenty-four hours, all topics are on the table—except school.
Things start with a bang. We get lost. I find downtown with no trouble, but Grayson and Fifth seem never to intersect. The longer we loop around, the sketchier the neighborhood becomes. Finally, by sheer luck, we turn up a blind alley and approach a ratty two-story building in need of immediate remodeling or razing. A precarious neon sign dangles over the front door announcing HI DEE HO. The letters hiss and blink. A green VACANCY sign sits in the window next to a rattrap.
“If you close your eyes,” I say, “you’d swear you were in Niagara Falls.”