“The last urine sample we got wasn’t too bad,” he said. “That was a little over an hour ago. Low volume, but I don’t think there’s any danger of immediate kidney failure. His pulse right now is . . . pretty good, I’d say. Weak and rapid, of course, but I don’t think he’s missing any beats.”
“What’s the systolic pressure?”
“That’s the good news. A hundred and ten.”
Sharon hummed a little note of satisfaction. She needed a minimum of ninety to risk an operation like this, and had wanted a hundred. A hundred and ten was higher than she’d dreamed of.
For an instant, a treacherous little thought tried to worm its way forward. How could I do otherwise? A wish from my intended is like a command from—
She squashed that, right quick. “Please introduce me to my colleagues,” she said, more loudly than she’d meant to. “And I think we should begin speaking in Italian”—that last sentence said in the language—”except in such instances where I might encounter an emergency.”
In which case, all bets are off and I’ll probably start hollering at them incoherently. But she saw no reason to add that. The two Venetian doctors standing at the table in their own scrub gowns looked to be even more nervous than she’d been.
Tom nodded. “To your left, Dottoressa Nichols, is Dottor Fermelli. He has agreed to serve as your first assist and scrub.”
He used the English word scrub, not the Italian translation of it. The full term in English would have been “scrub nurse,” but that last word needed to be avoided. In the parlance of the seventeenth century, “nurses” were purely scut-work menials with about as much skill and training—and social status—as a janitor. That was the reason, of course, that the embassy had from the beginning introduced Sharon as a Dottoressa. And since the Italian word for scrub was every bit as prosaic as the English term, Tom had apparently decided to fall back on the ancient trick—perfected by French chefs—of making something sound glamorous by using a foreign term for it.
Fermelli nodded politely. Sharon returned the nod and took the opportunity to gauge the man as best she could. He’d be the key assistant. The second Venetian doctor would be the circulating nurse. Which meant, under the circumstances, nothing much more than a gofer. That doctor was standing next to the small table that held the instruments and absorbents. She’d be curious to see what title Stoner had decided to bestow upon him in order to avoid the dreaded “nurse” label. Circulator, probably.
But it was Fermelli she’d be counting on, in case of trouble. And, perhaps more to the point, it would be Fermelli who’d have to be able to help her with the really grisly parts of the operation. Sharon could well remember her very first experience in an operating room. The operation she was about to do wasn’t that much different. It had been an abdominal hysterectomy. She’d almost lost it when they pulled the woman’s guts out and plopped them on her chest. To this day, she couldn’t eat sausage links.
And she’d just been an observer. Fermelli was the guy who would have to hold the patient’s guts once Sharon hauled them out so that she could examine them.
Because of the surgical mask Fermelli was wearing, Sharon couldn’t see most of his face. But the calm and steady look in his eyes reassured her. She’d told Stoner to make sure he found someone who had real hands-on surgical experience. Most seventeenth-century doctors—in Germany at least; she wasn’t sure about Italian practice—were really more in the way of medical theorists. Advisers and consultants, potion-prescribers and the like, not what Sharon thought of as a “surgeon.” The word itself was ancient, her father had once told her, deriving from the Greek kheirourgia and passing through the Old French serurgien before entering the English language. But, despite its majestic lineage, it had entered English through the cellar, not the front door. Until fairly recently in the universe she’d come from—not much more than a century, she thought—the distinction between doctor and surgeon had been entirely in favor of the doctor. The “surgeon” was the lowlife who sawed off legs, using booze for an anesthetic—and, like as not, did so while half-drunk himself.