Last Dance, Last Chance

than that.
     
    Debbie Pignataro had been called on to assist her husband that morning. Wearing hospital scrubs, she had to keep a sharp eye on the pulse-ox device on the patient’s finger and to check that her blood pressure was stable. Janie Krauss was in charge of adding meds to the tube going into Sarah Smith’s arm, and seventeen-year-old Tom Watkins stood at the head of the operating table, mostly observing, but ready to run an errand if Anthony requested it. There was no anesthesiologist, no nurse-anesthetist, not even a registered nurse present.
    The TUBA procedure began. But within less than an hour, sirens screamed as emergency medical units arrived at Dr. Anthony Pignataro’s office. The scene in the surgical area in the basement was one of horror and chaos. No one who was there would ever forget it.

10
    D an Smith came back to Pignataro’s office between two and two-thirty. As he walked into the waiting room area he heard someone whispering. “They were saying, ‘The husband’s here,’ and a woman who said she was Debbie Pignataro asked me to go with her into a back office.”
    Debbie had taken a deep breath, trying to find a way to begin. Finally she said, “We’ve had a little problem…”
    Dan looked at her quizzically. He wasn’t worried yet.
    “Your wife was not breathing—but she’s breathing now,” Debbie hurried to reassure him. “She’s on the way to the hospital. I’ll drive you.”
    Why would she want to drive him to the hospital? Dan started to explain that he was perfectly capable of driving himself, but there was a funny pinched look on the doctor’s wife’s face, and he followed her to her car.
    It wasn’t until he got to the hospital and a priest and nun came to talk with him that Dan Smith realized his world had tilted off center and something was terribly wrong. Someone led him to the intensive care unit, and he saw Sarah lying there with several tubes coming out of her body.
    “It was just like somebody grabbed my ankles,” he remembered. “I fell on my knees with shock. I realized then.”
    Sandy Smith, still on the job at the school where she worked, could hardly recognize her son’s voice on the phone. Usually it was soft and calm. Now he was screaming something over and over that she could not understand.
    And then she did. Dan was shouting, “She’s flat-lined! She’s flat-lined!”
    At first, she couldn’t figure out who he was talking about. Her husband, Tim, had been really sick, but he had recovered rapidly from the gallbladder attack. Sarah was supposed to have her surgery on this Monday, but her daughter-in-law had laughed at Sandy’s concern, “It’s not even a real operation,” Sarah had said. “I won’t even be put under anesthesia. He’s just going to give me a local and something to relax me.”
    No, Dan couldn’t be talking about Sarah. Sandy had worked as a medical assistant herself, and she knew what “flat-lined” meant. No brain activity, no heartbeat or breathing unless a machine did that for the person. Sarah was only 26 years old, and she was healthy.
    But Dan was talking about Sarah. His voice quivered with shock as he said he was with her at Buffalo Mercy Hospital, and he wanted his family to come. Sandy called her daughter, Paula, and they raced to the hospital as fast as they could get there. Barb Grafton, Sarah’s mother, was already there with Dan. Both of them were crying.
    All Sandy could think of was that Barb had lost her son, and now she might lose her daughter.
    Sarah was in a little cubicle, surrounded by curtains, in the hall of the intensive care unit. When Sandy Smith was allowed to look in, she gasped, “Oh, God!”
    Sarah lay pale and still, a respirator hooked up and breathing for her. It didn’t seem possible to Sandy that her spunky little daughter-in-law could be so still and unresponsive.
    A nurse looked up at Sandy, and when their eyes met, Sandy knew the outcome was going to be as bad as it could get.
    “Get a lawyer,” the nurse said softly. “Get a good one—this guy has put five people in the hospital in the last few weeks.”
    “Will she get better?” Sandy asked, a hopeless tone in her voice.
    “Not unless she comes back very soon,” the nurse said, but her face said more. Sarah’s chest rose and fell in the odd, mechanical way a patient on a respirator breathes. Sandy kept seeing the image in her mind of Sarah only nine days earlier as she grinned and said, “This is the last