“Guess you see a lot of people on their way to surgery,” said Berman to the orderly, as the elevator approached floor two. Berman was on his back, his hands beneath his head.
“Yup,” said the orderly, uninterested, cleaning under his nails.
“Have you ever had surgery here?” asked Berman, enjoying a sensation of calmness and detachment spreading through his limbs.
“Nope. I’d never have an operation here,” said the orderly, looking up at the floor indicator as the car eased to a stop on two.
“Why not?” asked Berman.
“I’ve seen too much, I guess,” said the orderly, pushing Berman into the hall.
By the time his gurney was parked in the patient holding area, Berman was happily inebriated. The shot he had received on orders from the anesthesiologist, a Dr. Norman Goodman, was 1 cc of Innovar, a relatively new combination of extremely potent agents. Berman tried to talk to the woman next to him in the patient holding area, but his tongue seemed to have become unresponsive, and he laughed at his own ineffectual efforts. He tried to grab a nurse who walked by, but he missed, and he laughed. Time ceased to be a concern and Berman’s brain no longer recorded what happened.
Down in the OR things were progressing well. Penny O’Rilley was already scrubbed and gowned and had brought in the steaming tray of instruments to put out on the Mayo stand. Mary Abruzzi, the circulating nurse, had located one of the pneumatic tourniquets and had carried it into the room.
“One more to go, Dr. Goodman,” said Mary, activating the foot pedal to raise the operating table to gurney height.
“How right you are,” said Dr. Goodman cheerfully. He let I.V. fluid run through the tube onto the floor to remove the bubbles. “This should be a rapid case. Dr. Spallek is one of the fastest surgeons I know and the patient is a healthy young man. I bet we’re out of here by one.”
Doctor Norman Goodman had been on the staff at the Memorial for eight years and held a joint appointment at the medical school. He had a lab on the fourth floor of the Hilman Building with a large population of monkeys. His interests involved developing newer concepts of anesthesia by selectively controlling various brain areas. He felt that eventually drugs were going to be specific enough so that just the reticular formation itself would be altered, thereby reducing the amount of drugs necessary to control anesthesia. In fact, only a few weeks earlier he and his laboratory assistant, Dr. Clark Nelson, had stumbled onto a butyrophenone derivative which had slowed the electrical activity only in the reticular formation of a monkey. With great discipline he had kept himself from becoming overly encouraged at such an early time, especially when the results had been from a single animal. But then the results had become reproducible. So far he had tested eight monkeys and all had responded the same.
Dr. Norman Goodman would have preferred to give up all activities and devote twenty-four hours a day to his new discovery. He was eager to advance to more sophisticated experiments with his drug, especially a trial on a human. Dr. Nelson, if anything, was even more eager and optimistic. It had been with difficulty that Dr. Goodman had talked Dr. Nelson out of trying a small subpharmacological dose on himself.
But Dr. Goodman knew that true science rested on a foundation of painstaking methodology. One had to proceed slowly, objectively. Premature trials, claims, or disclosure could be disastrous for all concerned. Accordingly Dr. Goodman had to rein in his excitement and maintain his normal schedule and commitments unless he was willing to divulge his discovery; and that he was unwilling to do as yet. So on Monday morning he had to “pass gas,” as they called it in the vernacular … devote time to clinical anesthesia.
“Damn,” said Dr. Goodman straightening up. “Mary, I forgot to bring down an endotracheal tube. Would you run back to the anesthesia room and bring me a number eight.”
“Coming up,” said Mary Abruzzi, disappearing through the OR door. Dr. Goodman sorted out the gas line connectors and plugged into the nitrous oxide and oxygen sources on the wall.