Exposure

1995

I was just starting to doze off on the large, leather couch in the resident lounge when my pager went off. I put down my copy of “The Secrets of General Surgery”, read the number that flashed on the device that was starting to dig into my hip and picked up the phone. “Hey Marie, is the patient in the holding area? OK, I’ll be right there.” I grabbed my white jacket and hustled down the corridor towards the operating room.

I arrived at the preoperative holding area and found Mr. Kingsford lying on a gurney either counting the holes in the ceiling tiles or making his final plea to a higher power. He was a previously healthy man in his 50’s who recently found out that he had a cancerous polyp in his large bowel and was undergoing a lengthy surgery to remove it. “Don’t worry. We’re going to take great care of you. I’ll go out and talk to your wife when you’re in the recovery room.” He forced a smile and I gave his hand a reassuring squeeze.

“Hey, Bill, are you ready to cure cancer?” My Chief Resident smiled at me outside the operating room and I quickly returned the smile and said, “Let’s do it.” When Mr. Kingsford was finally under anesthesia, I went out to the sink to scrub my hands and arms. Returning to the operating room, I prepped his abdomen with an iodine solution and placed sterile drapes over him, leaving an open space for the large vertical incision about to be made down the middle of his belly. The anesthesia machine was beeping along with the patient’s heartbeat and the intense overhead lights made the steel scalpel gleam as it was passed to my Chief Resident.

“Bill, can you pull on that a little harder?” The sweat was pouring down the side of my face and the muscles in my shoulder screamed in pain as I pulled on the retractor in my left hand and moved the small intestine out of the way. We were two hours into the case, and the Attending Surgeon and Chief Resident were close to removing the tumor. As the Junior Resident, my primary job was to provide exposure. That meant holding retractors, suctioning blood and generally making sure that the others could see everything they needed to see. Sometimes it was an impossible task, requiring many more appendages than God gave me, but sometimes retracting was just plain boring. It was not uncommon for a resident to lean back with all of his weight to keep the retractors in position and grab a few winks in a move referred to as “waterskiing”. During a slow point in the case, I found my mind wandering. I just couldn’t escape the feeling that I had been in this situation before...

1978

“Hey, Bill, are you ready to barbeque?” My Dad was standing in the kitchen wearing his New York Giants apron that he got for Christmas the year before as I replied, “Let’s do it.” While my Dad watched the start of the football game, I rolled our circular barbecue to the middle of the patio and wiped off all the cobwebs and leaves. I then dragged a 20 pound bag of charcoal around the side of the house from the garage to the patio. I dumped the briquettes into the grill, which made a sound like hail striking a tin roof, and a cloud of thick, black smoke enveloped me. Once the dust settled, I doused the black squares with lighter fluid and struck a match. Whooosh!! The cicadas made a rattling noise as the flames from the grill punched a tire-sized hole in the ozone layer and the temperature of Earth’s atmosphere rose by a couple of degrees. This maneuver almost cost me my eyebrows on several occasions. My Dad nodded in approval as he arrived with a thick porterhouse steak on a plate and surveyed the glowing coals. His barbeque tools shined in the midday sun as we began to cook.

“Bill, could you push down on the grill a little more?” For my Dad, grilling was both a science and an art. The circular grill was mounted on a central axle, which made it extremely unstable unless there was a perfect balance of food on all parts. I can only assume that the manufacturers of this product never actually tried to grill on it. To make matters worse, my Dad only used one half of the grill, which meant that I had to constantly counterbalance the other side with a long fork to prevent all the food from sliding off. Besides the fact that the fork was never long enough to completely protect me from the searing temperatures, this was no easy task for a couple of other reasons.

First of all, my Dad was constantly adjusting the distance from the coals to the steak using an equation known only to him and Albert Einstein. The muscles in my hands had not yet developed such precise control at that age, but I tried to oblige as he alternated between, “a little higher” and “a little lower”. Secondly, my Dad felt that it was necessary to repeatedly stab the meat until all the juice ran out onto the coals. This meant that I had to constantly anticipate his downward stabs to keep the system in harmony. If I was off by a millisecond, I could potentially launch the meat off the grill and send it to its final resting place in the azalea bushes. When the grilling was finally done, my Dad would point out once again all the physical attributes of a perfectly grilled steak. Inside the house, I iced my medium-well done fingers, wiped the black dust off my face and placed some Ben Gay on my aching shoulder before sitting down at the table to eat.

1995

After five hours, we were finished with the case. Mr. Kingsford was in the recovery room and his wife was relieved that the surgery went well. It was 10 o’clock at night and my Chief Resident and I both collapsed with exhaustion in the locker room. “So Bill, are you hungry?” “Yeah, I’m starving - Where do you want to go?” My Chief thought for a moment. “Hey, there’s a barbeque place right down the street!” My eyes widened and my jaw dropped open. After a few seconds, he said, “Maybe we should just go Chinese.”