The Soul of a Doctor by Gordon Harper

Author:Gordon Harper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2006-08-21T16:00:00+00:00

The Last Prayer

Joan S. Hu

MY FIRST WEEK OF OB-GYN. I am thrown into gyn-oncology right away, and the rotation is fast paced. Our team is always racing somewhere: OR, floor, “the Tower,” OR again, then back. Fifteen patients on the floor, and an OR schedule packed from dawn till long past dusk.

The scoop today is that we are planning a total exenteration for tomorrow a.m., exenteration being the Greek for “to scoop out the bowels; to eviscerate.” Pleasant thought.

Our star patient is Ms. S.—thirty-three years old, married, with a two-year-old baby boy at home, beautiful brunette, young and tan, who looks as if she could be on the cover of a magazine. Except that she has cervical cancer that reappeared only months after total abdominal hysterectomy, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy. She had apparently gone to Bermuda or somewhere for homeopathic treatment in the interim. Her cancer has now invaded the bladder wall and the colon, according to an MRI taken two weeks ago. The total exenteration will remove her bladder, the involved colon, and her vagina, and she will get a new plastic bladder, a reconstructed colon and rectum, and a 50 percent chance of survival. Without the procedure, her survival amounts to a whopping 0 percent. But first we are going to biopsy her nodes and pelvic walls to make sure the cancer has not already metastasized. Because if it has, there will be no exenteration, and there will be no life.

I am thrilled about the prospects of seeing this surgery, so complicated that it is expected to last anywhere from nine to twelve hours. I copy the elaborate chapter on the procedure in a surgical text with the intent of fully memorizing it for the next day. I am going to watch her surgery, since scrubbing in is an impossibility for a medical student on a surgery that is literally done only once a year at this premier tertiary care institution, if that. All the residents want to watch, and both fellows are scrubbing in, along with a general surgeon, a urologist, and our attending. This is going to be the surgery of the year.

I introduce myself to Ms. S. and her family as they wait in pre-op, thinking that it might help her to see a familiar face once she’s in OR. In a few minutes, the surgeon and anesthesiologist also show up, and just before we are about to roll her into the OR, the family wishes to gather around her, including us, her caretakers, to say one last prayer. As her husband says the first words, “Our Father, bless us,” his voice cracks, falters, breaks. “Give our daughter, our sister, our wife, the strength to survive this ordeal. Guide the hands of her surgeons so that they may rid her of this disease. May God bless her nurses, who are so caring and careful; give them and give us the strength to help her, our daughter, sister, wife, survive. Guide us, bless us, forgive us, and have mercy on us.

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