waiting for a “hand.” Someone had put a hand through a pane of glass and, judging by Dr. Kim’s blood-spattered tunic, the wrist had bled quite a bit. One of the nurses commented on Kim’s stained tunic.
“Wrists bleed,” the principal surgeon observed laconically. He introduced himself to Koesler as Dr. James Meyer.
“She really did a job on herself,” said Kim, who had treated the patient in the emergency room, thus the blood. “Wrist is almost completely severed.”
“Oh. God!” Meyer said, “that means three or four hours.”
Both nurses winced. The anesthetist showed no emotion.
“I was home,” Meyer said. “We were just getting ready to go skiing at Pine Knob when the damn call came.”
“Yeah.” The anesthetist smiled. “You said good-bye to me in OR.”
“Well, hello again.”
“You keep referring to the patient as a ‘wrist,’” Koesler addressed him.
“That is all we will see,” Kim said. The rest of her will be draped. All that will be exposed will be her wrist. You get used to that after awhile. All you deal with in OR are appendages of one sort or another.”
The nurses’ expressions seemed to register a silent protest.
“Do you know what happened to her?” Koesler asked.
Kim shook his head.
“Didn’t you talk to her?” Koesler could not imagine treating a conscious injured person without inquiring what had happened.
“I used to ask people what happened,” Kim said, “but it was always the same story. Nothing unexpected. Just walking down the street. Just washing a window. Just opening a door. When the glass broke, or the piano fell, or my boyfriend shot me. Always the same. So, I stopped asking.”
Koesler thought that an odd explanation.
“What’s the status?” Meyer asked.
“I put a pressure pack on it,” Kim said.
“What time is the hand scheduled?” Meyer asked.
“Four-thirty,” a nurse replied.
The principal surgeon consulted his watch and sighed. “It’ll go right through dinner.”
The intercom squawked. Koesler was not expecting the voice nor was he attuned to it. He needed a short period to grasp part of what he’d heard and put it together.
There had been an announcement of a trauma. About that he was sure. A trauma case had just entered the emergency room. A motorcyclist had been hit by a car. There were multiple head injuries. There was more to the announcement, but that was all Koesler was able to decipher. He thought that must be the substance of the matter.
Dr. Kim said something. It might have been in his own language. It sounded like an expletive. Koesler didn’t understand it, but he recognized the tone. The others registered emotions from disgust to disappointment.
“What’s the matter?” Koesler asked of anyone.
“The head will take precedence over the hand,” Dr. Meyer explained.
“They’ll have to call in another team,” the anesthetist said.
“Looks like we could be here till midnight,” one of the nurses said.
There followed a lively discussion ranging from laws that would compel cyclists to wear helmets to the general danger of riding on anything so unprotected.
“Danger or not,” Kim said, “that is what I want.”
“What’s that?” Meyer asked.
“A bike. A big one. With horses to spare.”
Koesler was slightly surprised. He never associated the notion of doctors with their wanting anything. His concept was too generalized to be all-encompassing, but Koesler subconsciously thought doctors could buy anything they wanted. Evidently, Dr. Kim could not. Not yet. A big expensive motorcycle must be part of his planned upward mobility. The plan that Dr. Scott had described.
“I’ve got a friend with a bike like that,” Meyers said, “who wants me to go along on a ride all the way out to the West Coast. A nut.”
“Sounds terrific,” Kim said. “If you do not want to go, you might tell your friend that there is another doctor at St. Vincent’s who is willing to go along with him.”
“Who said anything about a ‘him’?”
Kim smiled. “Even better.”
The phone rang. Kim picked it up. “Yes, the cyclist . . .? He what . . .?
“You could not, eh . . .?
“Well, that is terrific news! Very good! Magnificent!” Kim hung up and turned to his team. He obviously considered himself the bearer of good news. “The cyclist is dead. He arrested in ER and they could not stabilize him. The hand is coming down now.”
For just a moment, revulsion passed across the faces of the two nurses. Neither Meyer nor the anesthetist displayed any emotion.
“Will we do this with a local or are you going to put her out?” Meyer asked.
“She’ll be asleep,” the anesthetist replied.
A medical student appeared at the door of the lounge. “Your family is here, Father,” he announced.
“Thanks.” Koesler rose and left the lounge for the quiet room that in a few minutes would not be very quiet. He was shocked at Dr. Kim’s reaction to the death of the cyclist. Koesler could not imagine exulting over the death of anyone, much less a stranger whose care would be the cause of nothing more than an inconvenience.
During his time as temporary chaplain at St. Vincent’s, Koesler had met many other Oriental doctors on the hospital’s staff. He had never encountered a shred of indifference to human life from any of them. Before coming to St. Vincent’s, he had shared the Occidental prejudice which held that Orientals had a lesser value for life. That prejudice had been shaken when a Philippine parishioner had reminded Koesler that, to date, only Americans had dropped a nuclear bomb, that it was the Occidental allies who had leveled much of Germany with bombs of just about every description, and it was the United States that nearly destroyed Vietnam and Cambodia.
Considerations like that could shake one’s faith in convenient prejudices.
And, as far as St. Vincent’s was concerned, there was no hint of a lack of respect for life among either Occidentals or Orientals.
With the major exception of Dr. Lee Kim.
Until now, Koesler had only heard-tell of Dr. Kim’s reputedly casual approach to human feelings and life. Now, Koesler felt he had experienced at least the semblance of such an attitude.
Of course it was possible that Kim’s reaction to the death of a patient might have been a poor joke or perhaps an aberrant response. But given his reported history, this probably was Kim’s real personality.
If this were true, Koesler wondered further about Kim’s attitude toward Sister Eileen. If Kim, indeed, had precious little regard for human life, and if Sister Eileen posed a serious challenge to all Kim desired, what might be Kim’s intent with regard to Eileen? Could he be a threat? To her life?
Koesler had no answer to these questions. At the moment, they were no more than hypothetical. But how long could such a dangerous hypothesis go unchallenged? Koesler had no answer to this question either. Nor had he any more time to spend on such speculation. He was nearing the quiet room and a very vocal group was impatiently awaiting.
* * *
George Snell, nonpareil guard of St. Vincent’s Hospital, assessed his situation.
On the plus side: He didn’t have to patrol the ill-lit corridors. All he needed to do for this entire night shift was sit in the command center and watch the closed-circuit monitors. It was a promotion, with a promised raise in the near future. And he was out of harm’s way.
Actually, he never thought of St. Vincent’s Hospital in terms of danger. He was a very large man. And he was imbued with the false confidence of the big man who feels he can handle any challenge. He had never been thrown by a small person who was skilled in the martial arts. He had never even given any consideration to that possibility.
