Strangers

fifty-eight-year-old elementary-school teacher, mother of two daughters, wife of a devoted husband, a wry and witty woman with an infectious laugh, was silent now and still, lying on the operating table, unconscious, her life in Dr. Ginger Weiss's hands.
        Ginger's entire life had been a funnel, focusing on this moment: for the first time, she was assuming the senior surgeon's role in a major and complicated procedure. Years of arduous education, an immeasurable weight of hopes and dreams, lay behind her ascension to this moment. She had a prideful yet humbling sense of just how great a distance her journey had covered.
        And she was half sick with dread.
        Mrs. Fletcher had been anesthetized and draped in cool green sheets. None of the patient's body was visible except that portion of her torso on which surgery would be performed, a neat square of flesh painted with iodine and framed by lime-colored cloth. Even her face was out of sight beneath tented sheeting, as an added precaution against airborne contamination of the wound that would shortly be made in her abdomen. The effect was to depersonalize the patient, and perhaps that was in part the intent of the draping, as well, thereby sparing the surgeon the need to look upon the human face of agony and death if, God forbid,-his skill and education should fail him.
        On Ginger's right, Agatha Tandy, the surgical technician, stood ready with spreaders, rakes, hemostats, scalpels, and other instruments. On her left, a scrub nurse was prepared to assist. Another scrub nurse, the circulating nurse, the anesthesiologist, and his nurse also waited for the procedure to begin.
        George Hannaby stood on the other side of the table, looking less like a doctor than like the former star fullback on a pro football team. His wife, Rita, had once talked him into playing Paul Bunyan in a comedy sketch for a hospital charity show, and he had appeared at home in woodsman's boots, jeans, and a red plaid shirt. He brought with him an aura of strength, calmness, and competency that was most reassuring.
        Ginger held out her right hand.
        Agatha put a scalpel in it.
        A keen, thin, bright curve of light outlined the razor-sharp edge of the instrument.
        Hand poised over the score lines on the patient's torso, Ginger hesitated and took a deep breath.
        George's stereo tape deck stood on a small table in the corner, and familiar strains of Bach issued from the speakers.
        She was remembering the ophthalmoscope, the shiny black gloves…
        However, as frightening as those incidents had been, they had not utterly destroyed her self-confidence. She had felt fine ever since the most recent attack: strong, alert, energetic. If she had noticed the slightest weariness or fuzzy-mindedness, she would have canceled this procedure. On the other hand, she had not acquired her education, had not worked seven days a week all these years, only to throw away her future because of two aberrant moments of stress-related hysteria. Everything was going to be fine, just fine.
        The wall clock said seven-forty-two. Time to get on with it.
        She made the-first cut. With hemostats and clamps and a faultless skill that always surprised her, she moved deeper, constructing a shaft through skin, fat, and muscle, into the center of the patient's belly. Soon the incision was large enough to accommodate both her hands and those of her assisting physician, George Hannaby, if his help should be required. The scrub nurses moved close to the table, one on each side, grasped the sculpted handles of the retractors, and pulled back gently on them, drawing apart the walls of the wound.
        Agatha Tandy picked up a fluffy, absorbent cloth and quickly blotted Ginger's forehead, careful to avoid the jeweler's lenses that protruded from her operating glasses.
        Above his mask, George's eyes squinted in a smile. He was not sweating. He seldom did.
        Ginger swiftly tied off bleeders and removed clamps, and Agatha ordered new supplies from the circulating nurse.
        In the brief blank spaces between Bach's concertos and in the silence at the end of the tape before it was turned over, the loudest sounds in the tile-walled room were the sibilant exhalations and groaning inhalations of the artificial lung machine that breathed for Viola Fletcher. The patient could not breathe for herself because she was paralyzed by a