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1. Boy Crazy
I remember when I first truly fell in love with surgery. It coincided with my first true love for Amir Hadid, the man who changed my life.
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The first two years of medical school had been primarily book learning. It was boring and seemed to involve tons of rote memorizing. Social life was a non-starter. I was horny and bored. My third year was also a colossal disappointment.
Now I was entering the fourth year, rounding the corner of my first clinical year. Everything would change, I thought, as we engaged with real human patients. I stood in full uniform—scrubs, ponytail, clogs—ready to be thrown into the icy waters.
I had reported for duty at City Hospital in Westport without much instruction on what to expect. There were no smiles, no pleasantries. I was briefly introduced to my new surgical team, and I shook hands with Shay Meyer, the intense Israeli man who would be my chief resident for the month.
We headed toward the first patient’s room. Suddenly,a tall, dark figure in scrubs brushed past me. As our shoulders met, the tattered carpet generated a painful electric shock.
“Watch where you’re going!” I said.
“Everyone, listen up.” Shay, the chief resident, was now addressing us. “This is our fourth-year resident, Amir.”
“Oh shit,” I whispered, head down, my cheeks flushing with embarrassment at having rudely chastised an important superior.
I took the risk of looking at him. I had to look; we were being introduced. From behind the Clark Kent glasses, his eyes hit me with 360 joules of energy, the maximum setting on a defibrillator.
It was him, the handsome stranger I had seen in passing a few years prior and once, I confess, in my dreams. He stood well over six feet, with an imperious chest and broad shoulders filling out his short-sleeved green scrubs. His forearms flexed the muscles of a day laborer, his dark skin gleaming.
All of his kinetic energy pulsed through light-brown eyes with a dramatic touch of emerald green. His face, deep in concentration, seemed to harbor a spiritual and probing intelligence.
Warning bells from my childhood were chiming insistently. With a name like Amir and his coloring, he was almost certainly Arabic, not exactly the ethnic origin that my parents had in mind for a mate.
I lapsed back into reality. I knew the drill. I had buried my earlier clipboards at the bottom of my closet, under all the unworn stilettos. Clipboards were for meditrons. Surgeons were the cool kids, and we traveled light: one piece of paper, small illegible notes, tiny check-boxes representing orders and tasks.
Whatever didn’t fit in your pocket was irrelevant.
The nurses were known to be cynical and dismissive. Many of them had more practical experience than we did. But I was not going to be outsmarted. I’d arrived at the hospital at 4:30 a.m., a full hour early, and pored over the charts of every single solitary ward patient.
I was locked and loaded for rounds.
We started in the room of Mrs. Roberts, a newly postoperative forty-four-year-old woman who’d had her stomach stapled. The moment we entered, a noxious, fungal odor coming from her bed assaulted us.
At 450 pounds, she resembled Jabba the Hutt ofStar Warsfame. A candida infection had developed under one of her massive breasts. Her stringy hair was cut short at the neck, her face badly acne-pocked.
When she saw us, she bellowed a hearty greeting: “Good morning, team! The food sucks, and I’m pent up as hell, but I ain’t seen nothin’ ’round here worth fuckin’!”
A naughty smile sliced across her scarred face.
We calmed her down, checked her vital signs (all relatively normal except for elevated blood pressure), and communicated to each other in Surgeon Speak. This conveyed the numbers in a lifeless monotone. No time for emotion or improvisation.
I felt confident; I had already learned the lesson of seeing the patient as faulty software. I looked up at Amir again, my breath quickening.
No one noticed my eager reaction. No one except Amir, who looked up from the patient’s records and said urgently, “I need you.”
“Yes,” I thought. “Shall I go down on you right here, or wait for a more private moment?”
“You come with me,” he said. “We have a patient requiring manual disimpaction.”
Not what I had in mind. Unplugging a clogged bowel was not quite like a romantic jaunt in the park.
Amir began walking briskly, several steps ahead of me. He opened the door to the stairwell and started climbing, two stairs at a time, fully expecting me to keep up with him. And keep up with him, I did. I wasn’t going to give this handsome mofo any rope to hang me with.
Three floors later, at the patient’s bedside, he spoke. “I assume you have disimpacted patients before...”
