Dead Certain

box, revealing a large deep-dish spinach pizza with only one piece missing.
    “You are going straight to heaven,” I proclaimed over my shoulder as I made a quick U-turn into the kitchen. Returning, plate in hand, I shed my jacket and peeled off my pantyhose while Claudia served me up a slice and poured me a glass of wine.
    Curled up in the big armchair, my roommate looked less like a surgeon and more like a little girl dressed for bed in a pair of green pajamas. With her curly black hair parted in the middle and pulled back into a single long braid, all she needed was a teddy bear to hold. Unlike lawyers, surgeons dressed for function, not success. Claudia’s hairstyle was dictated by the fact that she could slip the braid down inside the back of her scrubs in the OR, and the scrubs, like prison togs, were institutional issue.
    It wasn’t until you looked closer, saw the fine lines of stress etched around her eyes, the splatter of dark stains that could only be blood, that you realized there was nothing at all childlike about her. Watching her dissect the pizza, I could not help but notice the exhausted slump of her shoulders. It was the cumulative effect of the years of sleep deprivation that are part of the surgeon’s rite of passage, deprivation that no single night’s sleep could ever erase.
    But I knew her well enough to suspect that it was more than exhaustion that was getting her down. Whenever I asked her what was wrong, she invariably shrugged and reminded me that trauma was not a happy specialty. I worried that what had been damaged was not the heart of some poor innocent from the street, but Claudia’s own.
    During the winter, despite the demands of almost endless work, she’d begun seeing someone, a handsome paramedic named Carlos, one of the you-maul-’em, we-haul-’em crew that worked the neighborhood around the Prescott Memorial ER. He was a good-looking soccer player with an infectious grin and a sense of gallows humor that found its natural expression in practical jokes. He’d won her jaded New York heart by teaching her to bowl, drink beer, and watch kung fu movies. The only trouble was that he was married. At least that was the conclusion she’d been forced to draw when a pretty young woman, pregnant and with a toddler in tow, showed up and delivered a bouquet of brightly colored helium balloons to the emergency room as a surprise for her husband on his birthday.
    Surgeonlike, Claudia had broken off the relationship cleanly, with a minimum of tears and few words spoken. However, as the weeks went by I’d suspected Carlos of trying to reexert his charm. In addition to a steady stream of cards and flowers, all of which Claudia had promptly sent back, we’d recently started being bothered by hang-up calls, always on nights when Claudia wasn’t scheduled to be at the hospital. Somehow I doubted things were as over in Carlos’s mind as they were in my roommate’s.
    “What are you doing home?” I asked, taking a sip of wine and feeling its warmth rush through me.
    “Waiting for you,” she replied. “I called you at the office, but the night operator said you were already on your way home. I need your advice about something.“
    “Well, if you thought you could buy it with food, you were absolutely right,” I replied. “What’s up?”
    “We almost lost another patient today,” Claudia said. “Oh, no!” I exclaimed. “What happened?”
    “We don’t know. That’s the problem.”
    “So tell me about the patient.”
    “She’s a sixty-seven-year-old Caucasian female named Ida Lapinsky. Indigent. History of adult-onset diabetes. Smoker. Probable history of alcoholism. She was admitted through the OB-GYN service, complaining of abdominal pain, and was subsequently diagnosed as having an intestinal obstruction. She was resting in her room following surgery this morning to remove the blockage when she suddenly and for no apparent reason went into respiratory arrest.”
    “Were there any complications during the surgery?“
    “None. I even tracked down the resident who assisted McDermott on the case and asked him. He said the procedure was completely unremarkable.”
    “So what happened to Mrs. Lapinsky?”
    “Like I said, nobody knows. Mrs. Lapinsky’s roommate woke up from her nap and noticed that she was turning blue and not breathing. Somehow she managed to call for help. I was at the nurses’ station doing some charting, so I was the one who caught the code. I