Coma

Surgery at the Memorial was the apogee, the zenith of the art of modern surgery, and being on its staff offered Nirvana, as far as Bellows was concerned. Bellows had striven hard and long for his appointment as a resident. Yet here, smack in the middle of all this excellence, was, as Bellows put it to his fellow residents, this ghoul. It seemed too ridiculously inconsistent.

Under normal circumstances Mark Bellows would have been inside one of the twenty-one operating rooms contributing to or directing one of the acts of mayhem. But on February 23 he was adding five medical students to his burgeoning list of responsibilities. Bellows was currently assigned to Beard 5, meaning the fifth floor of the Beard Building. It was a good general surgical rotation, maybe the best. As the intermediate resident of Beard 5, Bellows was also in charge of the surgical intensive care unit physically adjacent to the ORs.

Bellows reached for the table next to his chair and grasped a coffee mug without looking up from his work. He sipped the hot coffee loudly before abruptly replacing the cup with a minor clatter. He’d thought of another “attending” who would be good at lecturing to the students, and he quickly penciled the name onto the tablet. In front of him on a low table lay a piece of Surgical Department stationery. He picked it up and studied the names of the five students: George Niles, Harvey Goldberg, Susan Wheeler, Geoffrey Fairweather III, and Paul Carpin. Only two of the names made any impression. The Fairweather name made him smile and conjure up the image of a spoiled, slender fellow with glasses, Brooks Brothers shirts, and a long New England genealogy. The other name, Susan Wheeler, caught his eye purely because Bellows liked women in a general way. He also thought that women liked him in return; after all, he was athletic and a doctor. Bellows was not very subtle in his social concepts; he was rather naive, like most of his fellow doctors. Looking at the name Susan Wheeler, he reflected that having one female student might make the next month a little bit less of a pain in the ass. His mind didn’t struggle to find a mental image for the name Susan Wheeler. The part of his brain concerned with stereotypes told him it wasn’t worth it.

Mark Bellows had been at the Memorial for two and one half years.

Things had been going well, and he was reasonably sure of finishing the program. In fact, it had begun to look as if he might have a fighting chance for the chief resident position if everything went smoothly.

Having been selected while he was an intermediate resident to get a group of medical students was certainly auspicious, although a bother. It had been an unexpected turn and was the immediate result of Hugh Casey coming down with hepatitis. Hugh Casey was one of the senior residents whose job included teaching two groups of medical students during the course of the year. The hepatitis came on only three weeks earlier. Right after that Bellows had received the message to come to Dr. Howard Stark’s office. Bellows had never associated the message with Casey’s illness. In fact, with the usual paranoia following a request to come to the Chief of the Department of Surgery’s office, Bellows had mentally tried to relive all his latest blunders so as to be prepared for the tirade he expected. But contrary to his usual self, Stark had been very pleasant and had actually commended Bellows on his performance related to a recent Whipple procedure Bellows had done. After the unanticipated honeyed words, Stark had asked if Bellows would be interested in taking the medical students scheduled to be with Casey.

Truthfully, Bellows would have preferred to pass up the chance while being on the Beard 5 rotation, except that one did not pass up a request by Stark even if it were carefully couched in the form of an offer. It would have been professional suicide for Bellows to have done so and he knew it Bellows comprehended the vengeance of the affronted surgical personality, so he had agreed with the proper amount of alacrity.

With a straightedge Bellows filled the front page of his yellow legal tablet with little squares about an inch on a side. He then proceeded to fill in the dates of the subsequent thirty or so days the medical students were scheduled to be under his tutelage. Within each square he blocked off morning and afternoon. Each morning he planned to give a lecture; each afternoon he was going to enlist one of the attendings to give a lecture. Bellows wanted to schedule all the topics in advance to avoid duplication.