Rinsing the suds, Mannerheim caught sight of Lori Mclnter, the Assistant Director of the OR. He shouted her name and she stopped in her tracks.
“Lori, dear! I’ve got two Jap doctors here from Tokyo.
Could you send someone into the lounge to make sure they find scrub clothes and all that?”
Lori McInter nodded, although she indicated she wasn’t pleased at the request. Mannerheim’s shouting in the corridor irritated her.
Mannerheim caught the silent rebuke and cursed the nurse under his breath. “Women,” he muttered. To Mannerheim, nurses were becoming more and more a pain in the ass.
Mannerheim burst into the OR like a bull into the ring. The congenial atmosphere changed instantly. Darlene Cooper handed him a sterile towel. Drying one hand, then the other, and working down his forearms, Mannerheim bent over to look at the opening in Lisa Marino’s skull.
“God damn it, Newman,” snarled Mannerheim, “when are you going to learn to do a decent craniotomy? If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times to bevel the edges more. Christ! This is a mess.”
Under the drapes Lisa felt a new surge of fear. Something had gone wrong with her operation.
“I…” began Newman.
“I don’t want to hear a single excuse. Either you do it properly or you’ll be looking for another job. I got some Japs coming in here and what are they going to think when they see this?”
Nancy Donovan was standing at his side to take the towel, but Mannerheim preferred to throw it on the floor. He liked to create havoc and, like a child, demanded total attention where-ever he was. And he got it. He was considered technically one of the best neurosurgeons in the country, if not the fastest. In his own terms he said, “Once you get into the head, there’s no time to pussyfoot around.” And with his encyclopedic knowledge of the intricacies of human neuroanatomy, he was superbly efficient.
Darlene Cooper held open the special brown rubber gloves that Mannerheim demanded. As he thrust in his hands, he looked into her eyes.
“Ahhh,” he cooed, as if he were experiencing orgastic pleasure from inserting his hands. “Baby, you’re fabulous.”
Darlene Cooper avoided looking into Mannerheim’s gray blue eyes, as she handed him a damp towel to wipe off the powder on the gloves. She was accustomed to his comments, and from experience she knew that the best defense was to ignore him.
Positioning himself at the head of the table with Newman on his right and Lowry on his left, Mannerheim looked down on the semi-transparent dura covering Lisa’s brain. Newman had carefully placed sutures through partial thickness of the dura and had anchored them to the edge of the craniotomy site. These sutures held the dura tightly up to the inner surface of the skull.
“All right, let’s get this show on the road,” said Mannerheim. “Dural hook and scalpel.” The instruments were slapped into Mannerheim’s hand.
“Easy, baby,” said Mannerheim. “We’re not on TV. I don’t want to feel pain each time I ask for an instrument.”
He bent over and deftly tented up the dura with the hook. With the knife he made a small opening. A pinkish gray mound of naked brain could be seen through the hole.
Once under way, Mannerheim became completely professional. His relatively small hands moved with economical deliberation, his prominent eyes never wavering from his patient. He was a physical person with extraordinary eye-hand control. The fact that he was short, five-foot-seven-inches, was a constant source of irritation to him. He felt he’d been cheated of the extra five inches to match his intellectual height, but he kept in excellent condition and looked much younger than his sixty-one years.
With small scissors and cottonoid strips, which he inserted between the dura and the brain for protection, Mannerheim opened up the covering over Lisa’s brain to the extent of the bony window. Using his index finger he gently palpated Lisa’s temporal lobe. With his experience the slightest abnormality could be detected. For Mannerheim, this intimate interaction between himself and a live pulsating human brain was the apotheosis of his existence. During many operations, the sheer excitement made him sexually erect. “Now let’s have the stimulator and the EEG leads,” he said.