Oxygen Read Online Free Page A

and streamlined surgery until the historical amphitheater with the suited students, the ungloved hands, the chloroformed handkerchief has faded to the initial lurch of an assembly line.
    By the time I wheel my patient into the recovery room she is smiling, her cancer drunkenly forgotten in the absolution of drugs. “It looks good,” I say, stroking her hair back from her forehead and handing the chart off to Julia, her recovery nurse. “Dr. Stevenson will be in to talk to you in a few minutes.”
    She reaches up to her face; it’s such a common gesture after anesthesia. I’ve come to believe we must need some tactile reconnection with our own lips and eyes and nose to awaken. “It’s over? The surgery’s over?”
    “Surgery’s all done, sweetie,” Julia tells her. “Are you having any pain?” My patient shakes her head and relaxes back against her pillows. Julia turns to me. “My niece is coming in next month for a rotator cuff repair with Nuezmann. Would you mind taking care of her?”
    “I’d be happy to. Talk to her about an interscalene nerve block. Lots of those patients don’t need pain meds till the next day.”
    The recovery room is already filling up, a dozen strangers parked at monitoring stations lined up along the wall like wounded soldiers, a community of catheters and bandages and emesis basins. Even the pretense of privacy is secondary to keeping patients and monitors visible in case an alarm should sound or an airway obstruct. I pull a sheaf of papers from the back of my patient’s chart and start filling out triplicate billing pages and order forms and an anesthetic summary. The top sheet will stay with her permanent record to document my work, while the copies will be parceled out among insurance companies, hospital supply centers, the pharmacy and the anesthesia office, where my professional care will be translated into accounting codes and invoices. One of the nurses has stabbed some freshly cut blue hyacinths into an empty plastic urinal, and I lean over the desk to bury my face in their scent. This may be the closest I get to the outdoors today.
    Will Hanover, the senior partner in my group, bumps into me as he rushes from dropping one patient in recovery to meeting the next in the surgical holding area. “Hey!” He steadies me with an arm around my shoulder and slips his surgical mask off his face to dangle below his rotund chin. “Bethany may be adding another case in your room this afternoon. Are you on schedule so far?”
    I glance at my watch. “Thirty minutes behind. Can anybody else get Joe out? He was up all night.” First Lutheran hired four new surgeons in the past year, but hasn’t been able to recruit any new anesthesiologists. Will is in charge of our call schedule and spends hours figuring out how to staff all the cases.
    “Nobody’s free. This’ll be the third day in a row we haven’t had anyone out of the OR before seven. We should yank Phil out of his meetings and put him back in the operating rooms full-time. Then he’d hire somebody.” Will hikes his scrub pants up higher on his well-padded stomach and tightens the knotted waistband. It seems a gesture he’d like to use on Phil Scoble’s throat right now. Phil is the chief of our anesthesia department and a board member of the hospital. The rest of us have speculated whether this makes him more our advocate or our nemesis, but I think the answer varies in proportion to our fatigue. He has to walk a difficult line, being both one of us and one of “them.”
    “Didn’t he make an offer to that woman from New York?”
    “He did. So did three other hospitals with better benefits and better pay. I’m gonna give him a Foley catheter for a Christmas present this year—see if he likes the idea of working thirteen hours without a goddamn bathroom break.”
    Will splutters in my face as he rants, and I find myself wanting to console him more out of concern for his blood pressure than for collegial bargaining