“What good would it do? You’d have to get other doctors to testify against him, and no one would be willing to do that. This is a close community, and we all have to live in it, Paige. It’s almost impossible to get one doctor to testify against another. We’re all vulnerable and we need each other too much. Calm down. I’ll take you out and buy you lunch.”
Paige sighed. “All right, but it’s a lousy system.”
At lunch, Paige asked, “How are you and Sye doing?”
He took a moment to answer. “I…we’re having problems. My work is destroying our marriage. I don’t know what to do.”
“I’m sure it will work out,” Paige said.
Chang said fiercely, “It had better.”
Paige looked up at him.
“I would kill myself if she left me.”
The following morning, Arthur Kane was scheduled to perform a kidney operation. The chief of surgery said to Paige, “Dr. Kane asked for you to assist him in OR Four.”
Paige’s mouth was suddenly dry. She hated the thought of being near him.
Paige said, “Couldn’t you get someone else to…?”
“He’s waiting for you, doctor.”
Paige sighed. “Right.”
By the time Paige had scrubbed up, the operation was already in progress.
“Give me a hand here, darling,” Kane said to Paige.
The patient’s abdomen had been painted with an iodine solution and an incision had been made in the right upper quadrant of the abdomen, just below the rib cage. So far, so good, Paige thought.
“Scalpel!”
The scrub nurse handed Dr. Kane a scalpel.
He looked up. “Put some music on.”
A moment later a CD began to play.
Dr. Kane kept cutting. “Let’s have something a little peppier.” He looked over at Paige. “Start the bovie, sweetheart.”
Sweetheart. Paige gritted her teeth and picked up a bovie—an electric cautery tool. She began to cauterize the arteries to reduce the amount of blood in the abdomen. The operation was going well.
Thank God, Paige thought.
“Sponge.”
The scrub nurse handed Kane a sponge.
“Good. Let’s have some suction.” He cut around the kidney until it was exposed. “There’s the little devil,” Dr. Kane said. “More suction.” He lifted up the kidney with forceps. “Right. Let’s sew him back up.”
For once, everything had gone well, yet something was bothering Paige. She took a closer look at the kidney. It looked healthy. She frowned, wondering if…
As Dr. Kane began sewing up the patient, Paige hurried over to the X-ray in the lighted wall frame. She studied it for a moment and said softly, “Oh, my God!”
The X-ray had been put up backward. Dr. Kane had removed the wrong kidney.
Thirty minutes later, Paige was in Ben Wallace’s office.
“He took out a healthy kidney and left in a diseased one!” Paige’s voice was trembling. “The man should be put in jail!”
Benjamin Wallace said soothingly, “Paige, I agree with you that it’s regrettable. But it certainly wasn’t intentional. It was a mistake, and—”
“A mistake? That patient is going to have to live on dialysis for the rest of his life. Someone should pay for that!”
“Believe me, we’re going to have a peer review evaluation.”
Paige knew what that meant: a group of physicians would review what had happened, but it would be done in confidence. The information would be withheld from the public and the patient.
“Dr. Wallace…”
“You’re part of our team, Paige. You’ve got to be a team player.”
“He has no business working in this hospital. Or any other hospital.”
“You’ve got to look at the whole picture. If he were removed, there would be bad publicity and the reputation of the hospital would be hurt. We’d probably face a lot of malpractice suits.”
“What about the patients?”
“We’ll keep a closer eye on Dr. Kane.” He leaned forward in his chair. “I’m going to give you some advice. When you get into private practice, you’re going to need the goodwill of other doctors for referrals. Without that, you’ll go nowhere, and if you get the reputation of being a maverick and blowing the whistle on your fellow doctors, you won’t get any referrals. I can promise you that.”