Dead Certain

it’s different. To them, the patients are actually people.”
    “So how’s it going?”
    “A lot slower than you’d think. It’s hard to look for a pattern when you have no idea what you’re looking for.“
    “Just take your time. It’ll come to you.”
    “That’s the problem. It’s against the rules to remove patient charts from the hospital. If they found out I took them home, it’s a firing offense.”
    “How would they find out?”
    “They’re signed out to me. All it would take is someone else coming around looking for them. That’s why I have to get them back to the hospital as soon as I can.”
    “Why don’t you photocopy them?”
    “I thought of that. But there are literally thousands of pages. It would take me days.”
    “Then let me take them into the office. I’ll have our duplicators do it. You’ll have them tomorrow night. That way you can get the charts back to the hospital before anybody has a chance to miss them.”
    Claudia took off her glasses and laid them in front of her on the table, making her face look simultaneously unfinished and exposed. With her thumb and forefinger she massaged the bridge of her nose as wearily as an old man.
    “Goddammit, I wish I worked someplace where if you screw up, a brick’ll be out of place or there’ll be a little ripple in the cement, but folks aren’t going to die.”
    “I know it’s something of an understatement, but you’ve had a bad couple of days,” I reminded her.
    “No, the more I think about it, I’ve had a bad couple of decades.”
    “Oh, come on—” I protested.
    “No, no, listen to me. I’ve been giving this a lot of thought. How long have you known me?”
    “Since freshman year.”
    “And when did you find out that I wanted to go into medicine?”
    “Probably the first day I met you.”
    “You know why? Because I’ve known that I wanted to be a doctor from the time I was thirteen years old. Not only that, but from that time on I set out to do it in the most focused and rational way I could. In high school, college, medical school, choosing an internship—I never let anything or anybody stand in the way of what I wanted to do. My whole life was plotted and planned and aimed at getting this degree, getting this profession.“
    “Yes. And look what you’ve accomplished.”
    “I know. It makes me jealous.”
    “Jealous of what?”
    “Jealous of medicine. I love it and I’m mad at it.” She sighed as she put her glasses back on. “There’s a lot of talk among the nurses about surgeons being a bunch of superannuated adolescents. I’m starting to think that they’re right. We all spent the years that most people use to learn how to be grownups learning to be surgeons. I used to tell myself that it was just a guy thing, you know, boys and their toys. But now I see that there are things I should have done, things I’m sorry I didn’t have the courage to do.”
    “Like what?” I asked, conjuring up the image of Claudia with her hand inside Bill Delius’s chest and wondering what on earth she’d be afraid of tackling.
    “I should have taken a year off and gone to Europe when I had the chance when I was nineteen. I should have bought a Corvette when I couldn’t afford it or had my heart broken by the captain of the football team. Hell, when I was in high school, I didn’t even know they had a football team. I was always in the library studying. All the dumb little things that don’t amount to a hill of beans, but give you a chance to make mistakes, to get to know what it’s like to fail.”
    I saw her point. In the years since I’d begun practicing law, I’d gotten my lunch handed back to me on a fair number of occasions, but somehow having had practice falling on my ass as a teenager had made it easier. They say that good judgment is the product of experience, and experience is the product of bad judgment. But what happened when all you’d experienced was success?
    “This thing with Mrs. Estrada has just wiped me out,” confessed Claudia miserably. “The problem is that surgery is a catch-22. You couldn’t do it if you didn’t believe in yourself, believe in your abilities. You’d freeze up, you’d worry so much about the potential consequences of your mistakes that you’d end up making them. But you not only let it make you cocky, you even lie to yourself that it’s not arrogance. Instead you say that you owe it to your patient to have complete confidence in your skill. You tell