five-foot-eight, twenty-nine-year-old from Long Island whose parents, the story went, had bought him a personalized license plate for his first car that read “DOCTOBE.” Rosenbaum spent all his free time playing golf, desperately trying to make up for his inadequacies as a surgeon. He was a 20-handicap surgeon but a superb golfer, a skill that impressed some of his fellow surgeons far more than anything he could have accomplished in the operating room.
“I got it,” DocToBe Rosenbaum answered, finally getting the retractor properly attached. Cogan estimated the woman weighed close to four hundred pounds. Each flap of fat had to be a foot thick. Rosenbaum might as well have been trying to part the Red Sea, which, in this case, happened to be more white than red.
“What do you want, Cogan?” Beckler said without looking at him.
“Oh, I’m fine, Anne, and how are you this evening?”
“Take the peanut gallery somewhere else. I’ve got my hands full.”
Beckler always seemed to have her hands full. Cogan thought it was the only way she was able to function. The only problem was that in order to maintain her superiority she had to intimidate everybody into a more frazzled state than hers. The method worked well with her underlings—nurses and suck-ass residents like Rosenbaum. But it had less satisfactory results with her fellow surgeons, with whom she was forced to use more vicious tactics, the last of which was charm.
Cogan always wondered whether he would have forgiven her behavior if she’d been better looking. Not that she was bad looking—she was tall, thin, and had nice green eyes and alabaster skin. But out of uniform she dressed badly and was decidedly unsexy, almost androgynous. Cogan thought the longer she’d been one of the boys—been part of the club of surgeons—the more her exterior, from her mannerisms to her language, had become male. But on the inside she was still fiercely female or, at least, a fierce defender of feminist principles. And in that sense, Cogan, the Harvard man and an old boy if ever there was an old boy, represented to her all that was evil.
He, of course, disagreed with her assessment.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“Dammit,” Beckler said, ignoring him, “get the light in here. Are you sure she hasn’t had it out already?”
“I checked, Doctor,” the anesthesiologist said. “It’s not on her chart.”
“Check it again. She’s got scars all over the fucking place.”
Cogan took the patient’s chart from the anesthesiologist and looked at it. He could see why Beckler was concerned. The woman already had four scars on her belly from previous operations. Two were from C-sections, one was an appendix, and the other could have been from any number of other procedures.
“What’s the problem, Anne?” he asked.
“Let me see her chart,” said Beckler.
He held up the chart. “There’s nothing here about a gall bladder being removed.”
“Shit.”
“She can’t find it, can she?” Cogan whispered to the nurse.
“No,” the nurse whispered back, “she can’t.”
“Anne, why don’t you get a laproscope in there,” he said.
“I wouldn’t need a camera if Rosenbaum wasn’t such a lightweight.”
“Well, Rosenbaum is a lightweight. And I’m not scrubbing in. So you better get a scope in there.”
She shot him a piercing glance. Then she looked at the others, who were all waiting for her to respond. She was cornered and she knew it.
“OK,” she said after a moment, “let’s do it. Get her on TV.”
Usually, the camera, which looked liked a stainless steel wand, was used for laproscopic surgery, which was much less invasive than open surgery. Four small holes were cut into the belly. In one went the camera wand, and in the others, the surgical instruments. The surgeon could do the whole operation looking at a television screen and the patient would, in theory, be out of the hospital in two days instead of five.
“To the left,” Beckler said.
They all looked at the television screen. Rosenbaum was maneuvering the wand into position under the liver, where the gall bladder was supposed to be. He moved the camera around the area, once, twice, then a third time. Cogan didn’t see the gall bladder. But if the chart said it was there, it had to be there. And then he saw it.
“There,” he said pointing.
“Where?” Beckler asked.
“On the liver.”
Rosenbaum moved the camera to where he was pointing and pushed the liver to one side, flipping it up a little. And there, indeed, it was. A brown, pathetic-looking mass attached to the liver.
“Wow, look at that,” Rosenbaum said. “It’s literally fused