“ Okay, okay,” Quinn said.
“ There’s a bullet in my heart?”
“ What?” Izzy said. “She’s conscious?”
“ Where’s my daughter? Is she okay?”
“ She has a daughter?” Izzy said. “Where?”
“ Your little girl is fine.” Kathy Wells pointed and all heads turned to the other side of the glass wall. There was a little girl there, four or maybe five years old. She was alone.
“ For God’s sake, get her!” Izzy said. “Bring her here.” She turned to Shaw. “You do it!”
“ Who are you?” Shaw was getting to be a real pain.
“ Get the girl,” Quinn said. Then to Izzy, “Well, who are you?”
Izzy was stuck. She’d stuck herself in where she didn’t belong, but she hadn’t any choice. She had to say something, had to make it believable.
“ I’m Dr. Linda Eisenhower. My mother is Dr. Isadora Eisenhower,” she said, making up a fictional daughter. “I’m sure you’ve heard of her, because she practiced here for years.”
“ I came after she left,” Quinn said.
Shaw was approaching with the girl.
“ What are you doing here?” Quinn said.
“ I practice in London, at St. Thomas,” Izzy lied. “Aaron’s trying to recruit me. I was going to observe him today and talk after.”
“ Good enough for me.” Shaw was back with the girl.
“ So, you’re not licensed here?”
“ Mommy!” The child was frightened.
“ Is it true? Am I going to die if I don’t get an operation right away,” the woman on the gurney said.
“ Yes,” Izzy said.
“ Then do it.” She was very weak. It was a miracle she was conscious.
“ Blood pressure is 84 over 42, down from 95 over 55,” Kathy Wells said. “We have to do something!”
“ She’s passed out,” Shaw said.
“ Save my mom,” the child said.
“ We will,” Izzy said.
“ You can’t operate in this hospital,” Belinda Quinn said.
“ Heart rate is up from 110 to 120.”
“ Shit, we’re going now,” Izzy said. “We’ll worry about the legal after.”
“ Okay.” Quinn nodded to the orderly. “Take her up.”
“ Are you gonna make my mommy better?” the child said.
“ I am,” Izzy said.
“ Promise?”
“ Yeah, I promise.”
The orderly and Wells started moving toward the elevator with the patient.
“ I’ve paged Dr. Stanley, he’s the best perfusionist in Reno,” Quinn said. She had a Blackberry in her hand. “He’s in the hospital and on his way to the OR. I’m paging Dr. Seger now.”
“ Ralph Seger,” Izzy said. “He’s good.” He was the best anesthesiologist she’d ever worked with. He had to be in his seventies. She didn’t know he was still working. He’d recognize her. Damn. Still, she’d said she was her daughter and she’d kept her family life to herself. Ralph wouldn’t know she didn’t have a daughter. Maybe she could pull it off. She had to pull it off.
By the time she’d prepped and got to the OR, the patient had been prepped and the perfusionist was there and ready.
“ I’m Dr. Eisenhower.” She introduced herself.
“ I’m Dr. Stanley, call me Stan.”
“ Your parents didn’t?”
“ They did.”
“ A Performer, good, gotta love Medtronic,” Izzy said, referring to the heart lung machine. It was a third the size of what she’d been used to, so it could be used closer to the patient and at table height. She’d heard a lot about it, had been waiting for it when she’d retired years ago. She’d never used one. Still, she was a heart surgeon. If Dr. Stanley could do his job, so could she. She’d be alright. She had to be alright, she’d promised a little girl.
“ She’s tachypneaic and her breathing is decreasing,” Kathy Wells said.
“ Then we’d better get going,” Dr. Stanley said.
“ I’m set here.” It was the anesthesiologist, Ralph Seger.
“ I believe you knew my mother,” Izzy said, continuing the lie.
“ You look like her, though a younger version.”
“ Thanks, I think,” she said. “She’s ready, the patient?”
“ She is,” Seger said.
“ Then let’s do it.” To Kathy Wells. “We’re going to do a median sternotomy and we don’t have the luxury of time.”
Izzy made a six inch incision down the middle of the chest and all of a sudden she was home. She’d done this more times than she could count. This is what she’d been born to do and she did it well.
It was as if she were on automatic pilot when she cut along the breast bone and set the retractor. Once the heart was exposed she sighed.
“ Are you ready, Stan?”
“ Yes.”
“ Good.” Izzy cannulated the ascending aorta and venae cava, then cross clamped the aorta as Seger administered the cardioplegia, which would stop the heart.
“ Okay, Kathy Wells. The patient is on bypass and is doing fine. We can slow down now.”
“ That was fast,” Seger said. “You’re good.”
Once the heart was drained of blood, Izzy stepped aside.
“ You have good hands.” Izzy said to Wells.
“ You noticed, with all you were doing?”
“ It’s my job.” She smiled beneath the surgical mask. “I’d like you to palpate the heart.”
“ Me?”
“ This is a teaching hospital. You’re here to learn and I’m a teacher.”
“ Okay.” Kathy Wells slid her hands under the heart.
Aaron Shaffer burst into the OR.
“ What’s going on here?”
“ Not now, Aaron,” Izzy said. “I’ve a student with a heart in her hands.”
“ You what?”
“ Aaron, calm down or leave the OR.”
“ Nobody talks to me like that in my hospital.”
“ It’s my OR. Built with money I brought into this hospital.”
“ Who are you?”
“ I’m the first girl you ever loved. The one you couldn’t have, because the stars weren’t aligned. Because the time and place were wrong. God has given us a second chance. Don’t blow it. Stand back and let us save this young woman’s life.”
“ Iz?”
“ Don’t say a word. If you ever loved me, don’t say a word.”
“ Right.” Aaron stepped back, stunned.
“ I feel something,” Wells said. “In the distal septum.”
“ That’ll be the bullet,” Izzy said. “You’ll need to make a transverse incision-”
“ In the apex of the left atrium,” Wells said, finishing Izzy’s sentence
“ Right,” Izzy said.
“ Okay, I got it.”
