Last Dance, Last Chance

minutes while he was sent to look for things, and then the doctor had sent him up to find the Ambu-Bag. He had mistakenly grabbed one that was too small and was sent back for an adult size. By this time, he thought that either the doctor or Mrs. Pignataro was doing closed chest massage and the doctor was telling Janie to get the “shockers” ready.
    But even with a bigger Ambu-Bag, Tom said the patient’s lips were pale blue. She wasn’t getting any oxygen. Tom said he tried to follow the doctor’s directions to hold her jaw while the surgeon used a piece of metal that broke, and finally a coat hanger, to open an airway. And all this time, Janie was saying she didn’t know how to use the “shockers.”
    “Did you see the heart monitor?” Sedita asked.
    The boy shook his head. He had never seen any sign that either the EKG machine or the “shocking machine” were turned on.
    Dr. Pignataro had shouted at his wife to call 911, but when she stood frozen, Tom said he took the initiative and made the call. When the paramedics arrived, they had taken over and put the patient in the ambulance.
    The boy said that the doctor had located him later that day and warned him about what to say. Tom was to stress that he was only observing the operation. Anthony wanted him to say that he was employed by the clinic to answer phones. A few days later, Dr. Pignataro had called Tom and asked him, “Isn’t the media coverage wild?”
    Tom had no idea what to say to that.
    Only a teenager, Tom Watkins had given them the most comprehensive report of anyone who had been there in that chaotic scene in the operating room.
    This was definitely a different version than Anthony himself had written in his report, which was only three quarters of a page long. Whatever he lacked in technique in surgery, he made up for in his very professional-sounding report. He had always been good at making excuses and explaining away mistakes. In his report, his actions sounded entirely proper.
    But as brilliant as the report sounded, it was very difficult to explain away a dead patient. Perhaps only a man who viewed the world as Anthony Pignataro did would have chosen to blame the patient. He covered it in his “biography.”
    “What could have gone wrong? What information that, if available preoperatively, could have prevented this tragedy? Sure, an overdose of herbals taken in an attempt to ‘purge’ one’s system, leading to an extremely low potassium [count] could explain the events, yet one got the distinct sense that there was an unknown—an unknown that the husband may have well known.”
    Anthony even pondered that lawyers for Dan Smith were keeping everyone who knew the secret from talking.
    “Several days later,” Anthony wrote, still in Debbie’s voice, “it was revealed that illicit drugs may have played a role in the patient’s response to the sedation used during the surgery. The office manager reported an anonymous phone caller who stated that he/she felt that it was not fair the way the media was crucifying the doctor and that he [the doctor] should know that the patient had been partying with her boyfriend and doing cocaine the night before the surgery to celebrate her new breasts…I do not want to believe this. A brilliant mind and career [Anthony’s] may have been sacrificed for this error in judgment. Yet, too many subsequent coincidences occurred to call it paranoia.”
     
    The Debbie voice in the unpublished memoir was vehement that Anthony had brought Sarah Smith back and started her heart beating again. He actually blamed the hospital and Dan Smith for pulling the plug on her respirator, and laid out a plot whereby a conspiracy connected to the Erie County D.A.’s office had begun a spurious investigation into his actions, whereas he, the surgeon, had tried so heroically to save Sarah.
    “What had taken thirty-nine years to build,” Anthony wrote, still using his wife’s voice, “was destroyed in one week. Anthony was so bereaved that he could scarcely get out of bed in the morning.”
    Anthony quoted everyone from Kenneth Starr to the Bible to make his argument. He insisted that Sarah Smith had come to him with a defective heart and liver dysfunction, and that her own actions and those of her husband, the hospital where she died, and the District Attorney had brought him to the end of his career.
    Reading Pignataro’s manuscript isn’t easy, because he continually changes narrators, usually writing as