When the Air Hits Your Brain: Tales from Neurosurgery Read Online Free

headache, temperature’s 100.8, wound is dry. He’s three days out.”
    “How much is a little headache?”
    “Just…ummm…a little.”
    “Does he need a spinal tap?”
    “I don’t think so?”
    “Did you wake him up, or is this what his nurse told you?”
    Eric grimaced. “I didn’t wake him, he looked so peaceful—”
    “Chrissakes, Eric,” Carl exploded, “you have to wake them up! I know it’s early, but this isn’t the Ritz. They can sleep at home, and I’ve got to know how they feel every morning. The staff guys will go around at eight this morning, the patients will start bitching that they were up all night and nobody’s bothered to see them yet. That you stood outside the door and waved at them while they sawed logs isn’t going to appease anybody. After breakfast, go upstairs and ask this guy how bad his headache is and come and tell me.”
    And so it went, patient after patient. First Eric, then Gary, then Hank. Each took his turn relating the patients. Eric and Gary took a ferocious beating, while Hank’s presentations went unchallenged. Clearly, Carl looked at Hank as a colleague, while he looked at Gary and Eric as subordinates. He never looked at me at all. We finished at about seven-fifteen. Carl produced a large sheet of paper with the OR schedule for the week.
    “Hank, craniotomy for meningioma, room twelve…The only other case is one of the boss’s face pain patients in room five. Gary and I will do that together. Eric, go back to the floor and take care of all the loose ends.” The morning tribunal dispersed.
    Gary took me over to the OR dressing room, where gave me quick instructions on how to find scrub clothes and how to put on a hat, mask, and shoe covers. He also let me share his locker.
    “Eric’s being punished,” Gary whispered to me as I changed my clothes. “He’s not very up on things yet. Carl could have let him stand around with Hank on that brain tumor case, but he’s been sentenced to the floor to be badgered by the nurses all day.”
    “What are you going to do?”
    “Carl’s going to teach me to open one of the face pain patients. I haven’t done much more than help on that opening yet.”
    His face brightened. He was clearly looking forward to this. So far, I hadn’t seen anything to get excited about—getting up before the trout fisherman, rounding on teenage boys who were headed for a nursing home, eating greasy food, and watching grown men torment one another.
    Maybe seeing what went on in the OR would change my mind.
    I walked cautiously into operating room five, the first one I had ever seen “in the flesh.” Much smaller and less grand than I imagined an OR to be, the room’s walls were covered with shiny green tile, the floor a hard, blackish lineoleum. The room had a cold and hollow feel, like a large dormitory bathroom. Against the far wall, a woman in full scrub dress shuffled metal instrumentson a large table. To my left, skull X rays dangled against two light boxes hung at eye level. The patient occupied the center of the room and was already anesthetized, thick bore plastic tubing jutting from his mouth and nose, the eyes taped shut.
    Carl placed the man’s head in a large C-clamp, and then Gary, Carl, and the anesthesiologist flipped him onto his right side and padded him with pillows and pieces of blue foam rubber. They taped his body to the OR table and fixed the Cclamped head to a contraption at the top of the table. Gary quickly shaved a small patch of the recumbent man’s scalp just behind his left ear. The two neurosurgical residents then exiled the OR through a back door. I hurriedly followed them, afraid to be left alone in the OR. I feared I might commit some grievous mistake—touch something, sneeze, fart, anything that would ruin the operation.
    The door opened into a smaller room almost entirely filled by a long steel sink. Four faucets arched over the sink like silver swans: the scrub area. The two men taped their