Shedrow by Dean DeLuke Read Free Book Online

County.”
    “Have them keep trying Kantor, will you please. What the hell is it with these guys anyway?”
    “This isn’t the first time for him, I guarantee that.”
    “I’ll be in shortly.”
    Matt Kantor eventually answered his page and prepared the patient for the OR. The injury was too extensive to repair in the emergency room, but it needed to be repaired as soon as possible.
    Both the resident and the attending anesthesiologist were therewhen Gianni and Kantor entered the surgeons’ dressing room. Kantor was a short, stocky Korean lad who had been adopted as an infant and brought from Seoul to the United States. His parents were wealthy New Yorkers who had no other children and probably coddled the youth from infancy, Gianni thought.
    Larry Rosen was the attending on call, and he already had his anesthesia resident’s ear when Gianni came in.
    “Anthony, we meet again.”
    “Hello, Larry. Sorry to have to be the one to drag you in here tonight.”
    “No big deal, if it wasn’t you it would have been someone with some bogus emergency. Like the patient who’s been lying around the hospital for three days and suddenly becomes an emergency when the surgeon is done with his office schedule. You know how it goes. But I saw your guy and he clearly needs some attention.”
    They reassembled in the OR suite. Rosen was talking non-stop to the resident. He was an effective teacher, actually. On the OR table, the patient had already been anesthetized and an endotracheal tube placed through his nose. The injury had filleted his face open from a point above the right ear and extending down below the jaw. The internal part of the wound looked like a piece of raw steak, bright red against the dark complexion of the patient’s skin.
    Gianni then began to quiz his own understudy. “Okay Matt, what’s the pertinent anatomy here, what are we worried about?”
    “Well, I checked the facial nerve and it looks like all of the five branches on the face are grossly intact.”
    “After we’re scrubbed you can recite for me the course of the facial nerve from its origin on out to the terminal branches, includingall of the branches.”
    “You mean the five on the face?”
    “I mean those five plus the six before those. Why don’t you think about that.”
    “Um, okay.”
    “And what else are we concerned about here, Dr. Kantor?”
    “The parotid duct.”
    “Do you think it got cut?”
    “I’m not sure. I thought we’d look under better lighting in the OR.”
    “All right,” Gianni said. “Go ahead and scrub, he’s intubated already and I want to get a photograph or two for the record.” He snapped three photographs of the wound, then joined Kantor in the scrub room. In the OR, they prepared and draped the patient for the procedure. Kantor asked for some music.
    “Is it okay if I play one of mine, Dr. Gianni?”
    “It’ll probably keep me awake, at least.”
    “Can we put in that Bon Jovi tape?” Kantor asked the circulating nurse.
    “Believe it or not, I have a Bon Jovi album myself,” Gianni said.
    The music began to play:
    Why you wanna to tell me how to run my life!
    “Great song,” Kantor said.
    “Figures,” Gianni said.
    Who are you to tell me if it’s black or white!
    “So where do you want to start, Matt?”
    “With the jaw fracture, inside to out. Right?”
    “That’s fine. We should be able to get enough exposure to place a small plate right through the wound.”
    He began a careful blunt dissection, cut through the masseter muscle and aligned the bone fragments. Gianni adapted and secured a small bone plate to fix the broken fragments together.
    “Now how about that parotid duct, Matt?”
    “Shit, I forgot my loupes,” Matt said. “You have yours on. Can you find it?”
    “I already have found it. But I thought, since you’ve never seen one of these, you might have at least had the foresight to bring your own goddamn loupes. And where the hell were you when the ER was paging