Rewired by Dr. Ajay K. Seth

Author:Dr. Ajay K. Seth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2018-11-02T16:00:00+00:00

25

CHANGE OF PLANS

As I pulled my luggage through the Seattle airport, I realized what a wild day it had been. It had begun at five in the morning in Ohio before taking a wildly unlikely twenty-five-hundred-mile detour. I hadn’t expected to be here, and now I was. I needed my head in the game.

I hopped into a cab and rode to the hotel, which was across the street from the Seattle Convention Center. I wanted a good night’s sleep before the first lecture series in the morning. My body and Seattle had a three-hour disagreement about the time of day.

I leave for meetings way ahead of time because I get lost in conference centers—it happens every time, and this time might have been my getting-lost masterpiece: three different failed journeys to the correct room. I would have made a terrible wilderness scout.

Eventually I figured out I was on the wrong floor. I made my way to the second floor, where my friends gave me a warm greeting. It’s nice to meet those you know in an unfamiliar city, and I began to feel more comfortable.

The first lecture was on distal radius fracture fixation—the method of fixing a broken wrist with a plate and screws. More than two hundred orthopaedic surgeons from across the country were in the audience. I helped the group with cadaveric demonstrations.

Cadavers (corpses) are often made available for educational purposes. Apart from live surgery, cadavers provide the best way to demonstrate proper procedures. Medical students are often a little queasy with this teaching method in the beginning, but in time they get over it.

It was a very detailed lecture. The presentation was finished by midafternoon; then we had a break before meeting up for dinner as a group.

The next day was largely the same, but I decided to explore downtown Seattle on the following day rather than spend extra time in meetings. I’d never been to the “Emerald City,” and I wanted to get a taste of its urban life.

As I left the center, I made a call to check with my schedulers back in Ohio. I went through my list of patients with them, answered questions, and made recommendations, and noticed that Melissa’s name never came up.

“What’s going on with Melissa Loomis?” I asked. “She’s still at home, right?”

“Yes. We haven’t heard a word from her. But you could check with Tyler.”

Melissa was supposed to call Tyler, my right-hand man, if anything changed. I sent him a text and asked, “Any problems? Any fever?”

A text came back within a few minutes:

Stop worrying about Melissa. Enjoy yourself and relax.

Her fever hasn’t gone above 99 degrees. It’s all good!

I smiled, appreciating his encouragement for me to relax—a tall order with this case, no matter how many thousands of miles away I was. But another reason to smile was that Melissa was at home resting with no fever. Didn’t this have to mean her infection was gone—that we’d somehow slain the invisible monster, or at least that it had

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.