“May I have your X-ray request, please?” asked a young and extremely thin X-ray technician. Berman had waited over forty minutes in X-ray before being called.
“I don’t have an X-ray request,” said Berman, glancing through the papers he’d been given.
“You must have one. All admissions have one.”
“But I don’t.”
“You must.”
“I tell you I don’t.”
Despite the obvious frustration, the ridiculous admission sequence had had one positive effect. It had totally occupied Berman’s consciousness, and he did not dwell upon his impending surgery. But once in his room, hearing the random moans through partially closed hospital doors, Sean Berman was forced to confront his imminent experience. Even more difficult to dismiss were the people with bandages or even tubes that issued forth mysteriously from areas of the human body without natural orifices. Once in the hospital environment, denial was no longer an effective means of psychological defense.
Berman then tried another tactic; he switched to what the psychiatrists call reaction formation. He let himself think about his upcoming operation to the point where he seemingly made light of the idea.
“I’m one of the dieticians and I’d like to discuss your meal selection,” said an overweight woman with a clipboard who entered Berman’s room after a sharp knock. “You are here to have surgery, I presume.”
“Surgery?” Berman smiled. “Yeah, I have it about once a year. It’s a hobby.”
The dietician, the lab technician, anyone who would listen, became a victim of Berman’s offhand comment about his scheduled operation.
To an extent this method of defense was successful, at least until the actual morning of the operation. Berman had been awakened at six-thirty by the sound of some jangling cart in the corridor. Try as he might, he had been unable to fall back to sleep. Reading had been impossible. The time had dragged horribly, slowly yet inexorably toward 11, when his surgery was scheduled. His stomach had growled from its emptiness.
At 11:05 the door to his room burst open. Berman’s pulse fluttered. It was one of the harried nurses.
“Mr. Berman, there’s going to be a delay.”
“A delay? How long?” Berman forced himself to be civil. The agony of anticipation was taking its toll.
“Can’t say. Thirty minutes, an hour.” The nurse shrugged.
“But why? I’m starved.” Berman really wasn’t hungry; he was too nervous.
“The OR’s backed up. I’ll be back later to give you your pre-op meds. Just relax.” The nurse departed. Berman’s mouth was open, ready for another question, a hundred questions. Relax? Fat chance. In fact, until Susan’s appearance, Sean Berman had spent the entire morning in an uninterrupted cold sweat, dreading the passage of each moment, yet at the same time wishing time would hurry by. Several times he had felt a tinge of embarrassment at the depth of his anxiety, and he wondered if his feelings were relative to the seriousness of the anticipated surgery. If that were the case, he felt he could never undergo a truly serious operation. Berman was worried about feeling pain, worried that his leg might not be ninety-eight percent better, as his doctor had promised, worried about the cast he would have to wear on his leg for several weeks after the operation. He wasn’t worried about the anesthesia. If anything, he worried that they might not put him to sleep. He did not want local anesthesia; he wanted to be out cold.
Berman did not worry about possible complications, nor did he worry about his mortality. He was too young and healthy for that. If he had, he would have thought twice about having the operation. It had always been one of Berman’s faults, to miss the forest for the trees. Once he had designed an architecturally award-winning building only to have it turned down by the local city council just because it did not fit into the surroundings. Fortunately Berman was unaware of the stricken Nancy Greenly in the ICU.
For Berman, Susan Wheeler had been a star on a cloudy night. In his overly sensitized and anxiety-ridden state, she had seemed like an apparition coming to help him pass the time, to ease his mind. But she had done more. For the first few moments of the morning Berman had been able to think of something besides his knee and the knife. He had given every ounce of concentration to Susan’s comments and all too brief self-revelation. Whether it was Susan’s attractiveness or her obvious wit or just Berman’s own emotional vulnerability, he had been charmed and delighted and felt immeasurably more comfortable on his ride in the elevator down to the operating room. He also considered that the shot Ms. Sterns had given him might have contributed, because he began to get a little light-headed and images began to be slightly discontinuous.