He got used to contenting himself with four or five hours of sleep, after which he got up, alert and energetic. He spent days on end at the hospital, working all the time until he earned from his colleagues and professors the nickname “Dr. Ready” because he immediately accepted any task to which he was assigned. Every day he would be present at operations, attend lectures, and study his lessons. His great capacity for work surprised his professors and earned their admiration. When he got tired, the moment he felt he couldn’t go on anymore, Karam Doss would close the door and kneel before the cross he kept above his bed. He would close his eyes and repeat in supplication “Our Father who art in Heaven,” then pray to God to give him strength and patience. He spoke to the Lord as if he saw him in front of him: “You know how much I love You and believe in You. I’ve been wronged and you will give me back my rights. Bless me and don’t forsake me.”
The Lord answered his prayers, and he moved from one success to another. He completed his MS and MD with flying colors then got a position as a surgeon. He got the most important break in his life when he worked, for a full five years, as an assistant to one of the greatest legends of heart surgery in the world, Professor Albert Linz. That was the last step before the top for Karam Doss, and after this he became, as he had dreamed, a capable and famous surgeon who performed operations three days a week at the renowned Northwestern Memorial Hospital. Dr. Karam would arrive at the hospital at exactly 6:30 a.m., greet the workers busy cleaning the floor and exchange lighthearted words with the old black woman receptionist. He would put on his face that reassuring smile he’d acquired during his training as he answered the patient’s family’s anxious questions. Then he would take off his clothes and put on surgeon’s scrubs, and rub his arms, fingers, and fingernails with the brush and sterilizing solution. After that he would stand erect as the nurse wrapped the operating gown around him and tied it in the back, and then he would extend his hands, which she would fit into the gloves. It was only then that Karam Doss got rid of his ordinary day-to-day existence and acquired a mythical dimension, as if he were an imaginary person or a hero in an epic. He would become unique, lofty, invincible, using his will to control everything around him. He would become the embodiment of the famous saying “A true surgeon has the heart of a lion, the eyes of a hawk, and the fingers of a piano player.”
It’s cold in the operating room; floodlights are trained on the chest of the patient lying there awaiting his fate. The sound of his breathing in the machine and his heartbeats, which are amplified dozens of times, compound the awe of the situation. The surgical team comprises the nurses, the anesthesiologists, and the assistants. Dr. Karam greets them then tells them a joke or something funny at which they laugh in an exaggerated manner to disguise their tension. He follows them as they work, with a scrutinizing look, not without affection, as if he is a maestro watching his musicians playing and awaiting, in accordance with a mysterious internal rhythm, the moment he joins in. When that moment comes, Dr. Karam extends his hand forward with the scalpel, as if inaugurating the show. He turns the scalpel in the air to the right and the left, and then brings it down to the patient’s skin, touching it gently several times as though testing it out. Then suddenly he pounces on it, plunging the blade into the tissues with one deep cut, almost lustful and unbelievable. The blood bursts profusely and the assistants’ hands hurry with suction tubes and dressings. Dr. Karam works slowly, confidently, and calmly with an amazing concentration that makes him the first to warn the anesthesiologist about an almost invisible blueness on the patient’s face, or to notice the eruption of a microscopic drop of blood a full ten seconds before his assistants notice it. During the surgery, everything is done with strict precision: the patient’s heart is taken out and the patient is connected to the artificial heart machine. Then Dr. Karam replaces the patient’s clogged arteries with other ones taken from the leg and tested well outside the body. Then he attaches the new arteries and ultimately he resumes pumping the blood to the heart that he has fixed with his own hands. The operation lasts many hours, during which his hands don’t stop working while the eyes of the assistants are hanging on to the slightest gesture from him, to act upon it immediately. They often understand what he wants before he opens his mouth. With long experience they are able to read his face behind the mask, and so long as he is working in silence it means that everything is all right. If his hands stop working, it means something is wrong. His hoarse voice soon reverberates around the room in a warning dramatic tone as if he were the captain of a ship about to go down—“Operate auxiliary suction,”
“Give him something to raise the pressure,” or “I’ll need another hour.” They all obey him at once; he is the professor, the surgeon, and the experienced skillful leader who shoulders the responsibility for bringing this sleeping patient back to life. The fate of a whole family is now hanging on his ever-moving fingers.
Karam Doss was a truly great surgeon, and like many greats, he was eccentric. For instance, he would always take off his underwear and wear his scrubs directly on top of his naked body, giving him a sense of freedom that also gave his mind clarity and focus. Ever since he headed the surgical team ten years ago he started performing his surgeries listening to Umm Kulthum’s songs, whose voice reverberated in the operating room from speakers that Dr. Karam ordered to be installed in the wall, connected to a stereo in the adjacent room. The scene, though strange, became familiar: the listeners on the tape applauding and shouting so that Umm Kulthum would repeat a phrase of “Inta Umri” (“You Are My Life”) or “Ba‘id ‘Annak” (“Away from You”), saying how great the Sitt was, or screaming in ecstasy when Muhammad Abdu played one of his incomparable solos on the
One time, two years ago, an assistant surgeon named Jack joined the team. As soon as Dr. Karam saw him he realized from his long experience in America that he was a bigot. Not long after Jack joined the team, silent skirmishes, intangible, wordless quarrels began to take place between him and Dr. Karam. Jack never laughed at Karam’s jokes and fixed him with long, cold, scrutinizing stares. He also followed his instructions reluctantly, carrying them out in a deliberately slow manner as if telling him, “Yes, I work under you; I’m just an assistant and you’re a big-time surgeon, but don’t you forget that I’m a white American, master of this country, and you’re just a colored Arab who has come from Africa and we have taught you and trained you and made a civilized person out of you.”
Dr. Karam ignored Jack’s provocative gestures and took pains to deal with him in a formal and neutral manner. One day, however, he was surprised to see him come in a few minutes before the operation while he was sterilizing his hands and arms. Jack stood next to him and greeted him curtly then said in a voice choked with confusion and hatred, “Professor Karam, please stop playing those depressing Egyptian songs during surgery, because they prevent me from focusing on my work.”
Karam Doss remained silent, finished the sterilization carefully, and turned toward Jack with his hands raised and his frowning face flushed with anger, looking more like a wise Coptic priest about to dumbfound the wicked with the truth, and said calmly, “Listen, son, I’ve worked very hard for thirty years so that I can have the right to listen to whatever I like in the operating room.”
He advanced a few steps in a manner fraught with meaning, then pushed the door leading to the operating room with his foot and said before disappearing behind it, “You can find a place in another surgery team if you like.”
~~~~~~~~~
THERE IS NOTHING IN KARAM Doss’s life except surgery; it is his job and his great pleasure at the same time. Very simply, he is a workaholic. He has a few friends that he rarely has the time to see. His only pleasure, next to surgery, is a few glasses of whiskey and a good book. He is over sixty and is still unmarried because he doesn’t have the time for all that.
He told his students (when they complained about working long hours) his story about the beautiful Italian woman he met twenty years earlier. They had gone out more than once and they had a good relationship, but it so happened that whenever he was about to sleep with her, he would be called for an emergency. Then there was that one night when things were proceeding as well as could be hoped for: he went with her to her apartment, where they had dinner, had a few drinks, took off their clothes, and actually started to make love. Suddenly his pager emitted that abominable buzz. Karam jumped up, getting off her, then started putting on his clothes in no particular order and began to apologize to her, using moving language about it being his duty to save the life of a person who needed him right away. But he was surprised that she hurled a whole dictionary of Italian insults at him and his parents. Then she got so angry that she started chasing him like a furious, ferocious tigress, which made him run for his life as she threw everything in the room she could lay hands on at him. Dr. Karam would laugh heartily whenever he related the story, but his face would turn serious again as he advised young surgeons, “If you fall in love with surgery, you won’t be able to love anything else.”
