Last Dance, Last Chance

be in his teens. He wore scrubs, too. So did a young female nurse.
    She felt another needle in her vein, and then only a soft blackness. Connie remembered nothing more until she finally woke up at 4:30 in the afternoon.
    Her husband was waiting to drive her home, and he helped her to their car. But on the way Connie realized that she was bleeding so heavily that the blood was oozing scarlet splotches through her clothes. She couldn’t walk, so her husband carried her into the house. She couldn’t even sit upright on a chair.
    Connie Vinetti kept hemorrhaging, so much so that the carpet beneath her turned bright red. Her husband was very worried, and he called Dr. Pignataro before six that evening.
    The doctor didn’t seem at all concerned. He explained that he got “these calls all the time. I know it looks like blood, but it’s really just drainage,” he said soothingly. “Connie has a lot of fluid in her.”
    What, the worried husband asked, were they supposed to do to stop the bleeding? Pignataro suggested that he purchase some sanitary napkins to absorb the leakage from the incision. They would be more absorbent than a regular bandage.
    They tried that, and Connie pressed the super-size sanitary pad against the gash in her abdomen. It wasn’t a sterile bandage, but she didn’t think of that. The bleeding continued, leaking through the layers of the pad. Soon, she was in excruciating pain as whatever Dr. Pignataro had given her wore off.
    “I tried to tough it out over the next two days,” Connie recalled.
    By Thursday, August 7, she could no longer bear the pain. She went back to see Dr. Pignataro early in the morning and waited for twenty minutes until he hurried in, not apologizing for being late. By that time, the upper part of her belly was severely swollen.
    Pignataro examined Connie and told her he had found the problem; the girdle he’d placed around the incision after surgery should have been located higher. “That’s why you have this swelling,” he said easily. But as he pushed against the swollen spot, she began to bleed again.
    He suggested that she come back early Saturday morning. He was going out of town later in the day, but he would see her at 6:30 A.M.
    And then Connie Vinetti watched in shock as Pignataro summoned Sue, his young nurse. “Sue will take care of you next week,” he said.
    “Sue, do you know how to suture using staples?” he asked.
    “No,” she said, shaking her head nervously.
    He brought out what appeared to be a surgical stapler and touched it to Connie’s bloody incision. She wondered if it was sterile. She thought probably it wasn’t when he put it back on the shelf without even wiping it with alcohol.
    How was Sue going to take care of her when she obviously didn’t know anything about patching a wound back together?
    “Your drainage tubes are pointing up,” Dr. Pignataro muttered.
    “What…?”
    “They’re supposed to be pointing in the other direction,” he said, as if someone other than himself had put them in.
    At that point, Connie Vinetti lost all confidence in this doctor, who had seemed so professional when she first visited him. She was in terrible pain, she probably had some kind of infection, and he was simply going to go out of town and leave her in the care of a girl who clearly had next to no experience.
    Connie got up from the examining table and said she’d be back, but she left, determined never to see him again.
    Connie got even sicker as Thursday wore on, and her husband called the ER at Buffalo Mercy Hospital. He said his wife was very sick and in pain, and was told to bring her in.
    Dr. K., the physician who examined Connie in the ER, saw that her abdomen was grossly distended and her temperature was soaring. Removing the elastic bandage commonly used after liposuction, he saw that her incision was badly infected with bacteria. Pockets of pus had formed. Some of the flesh around the incision was necrotic (dead). The swelling was so profound that he suspected she might have an ileus, a temporary paralysis of the bowel that sometimes follows surgery in which the walls of the abdomen have been perforated.
    The ER doctor admitted Connie Vinetti at once to Buffalo Mercy Hospital. He went a step further and took Polaroid pictures of the incision. The wound had been stapled so clumsily that it looked like a crazy quilt, with all the edges of the incision mismatched.
    One of the nurses on duty recalled Connie’s condition with a