The Other Side of the Curtain

It’s 0730 and I’m not in the OR for a change. I’m in the surgery waiting room. Up at 0330, nervous, my wife in the shower with the antiseptic soap for her timed, three-minute last dose. Two hard-boiled eggs for me and a double coffee from the Kureg...

“The Dick”

There were no cars behind me. Why should there be? It was 0430 and I was at the stop sign on Wyatt St. six blocks south of Children’s. All I needed to do was turn right, like I had every other morning the past seven weeks. I saw the headlights half-a mile further...

Good Bye Angel

“Jesus Christ, take the trocar out. You shouldn’t be using it until you know what you’re doing, which probably isn’t going happen anytime soon.” She stood on the other side of the metal procedural table that was covered with a sterile drape on which the thoracostomy...

Thank you, Bucky

It was a weekend, in the night, like it always is; the patient, a 32yo narcotic addicted woman who’d been filling her Vicodin from a pain doctor in another city in another state for her upper abdominal pain for the past week. I’m not saying I don’t understand. Chronic...