Strangers

warm emotion. If she had been anywhere but in an operating room, tears would have come to her eyes, but here she kept a tighter rein on her feelings. However, the intensity of her reaction to his words made her aware of how completely he had filled the role of father-figure in her life; she took nearly as much satisfaction from his praise as she would have taken if it had come from Jacob Weiss himself.
        Ginger proceeded with the operation in better spirits. The disturbing possibility of a seizure slowly receded from her thoughts, and greater confidence allowed her to work with even more grace than before. Nothing could go wrong now.
        She set about methodically controlling the flow of blood through the aorta, carefully exposing and temporarily clamping all branching vessels, using thin elastic loops of extremely pliable plastic tubing to valve off the smaller vessels, placing mosquito clamps and bulldog clamps on the larger arteries, including the iliacs and the aorta itself. In little less than an hour, she had stopped all blood flow through the aorta to the patient's legs, and the throbbing aneurysm had ceased its mocking imitation of the heart.
        With a small scalpel, she punctured the aneurysm, releasing a pool of blood; the aorta deflated. She sliced it open along its anterior wall. At that moment, the patient was without an aorta, more helpless and more dependent upon the surgeon than at any other time. There was no going back now. From this point on, the operation must be conducted not only with the greatest care but with the most prudent speed.
        A hush had fallen on the surgical team. What little conversation there had been now ceased. The Bach tape had reached the end again, and no one moved to turn it over. Time was measured by the wheezing and sucking of the artificial lung machine and by the beeping of the EKG.
        Ginger removed the Dacron graft from the steel tray, where it had been soaking up blood and clotting precisely as desired.
        She sewed the top of it into the aortal trunk, using an extremely fine thread. Then, with the top of the graft sewn in place and the unattached bottom clamped off, Ginger filled it with blood to let it clot again.
        Throughout these steps of the operation, it had not been necessary for Ginger to have the sweat blotted from her forehead. She hoped that George noticed her new dryness - she was sure he did.
        Without needing to be told that it was once again time for music, the circulating nurse reset the Bach tape.
        Hours of work lay ahead of Ginger, but she pressed on without the least weariness. She moved down the draped body, folding back the green sheets, revealing both of the patient's thighs. With the help of the circulating nurse, Agatha had replenished the instrument tray and was ready now with everything that Ginger needed to make two more incisions, one in each of the patient's legs, below the inguineal creases, where the legs attached to the body trunk. Clamping and tying off vessels, Ginger eventually exposed and separated the femoral arteries. As with the aorta before, she used thin elastic tubing and a variety of clamps to valve off the blood flow through these vascular fields, then opened both arteries where the bifurcated legs of the graft would attach to them. A couple of times she caught herself humming along happily with the music, and the ease with which she worked made it seem almost as if she had been a surgeon in an earlier life, now reincarnated into the elite brotherhood of the caduceus, predestined for this labor.
        But she should have remembered her father and his aphorisms, the bits of wisdom that he had collected and with which he had gently lectured or patiently admonished her on those rare occasions when she had been less than well behaved Or when she had failed to do her very best in school. Time waits for no man; God helps those who help themselves; a penny saved is a penny earned; resentment hurts only those who harbor it; judge not that ye be not judged… He had a thousand of them, but there was none he liked better and none he repeated more often than this one: Pride goeth before a great fall.
        She should have remembered those six words. The operation was going so well, and she was so happy with her work, so proud of her performance in this first major solo flight, that she forgot about the inevitable great fall.
        Returning to the opened abdomen, she