Page 16 of Undeniably Convenient

“I intend to, Dr. Lawson.” With that, she pulls away from the sink, forearms wet and held out in front of her as she enters the OR backward.

A few moments later, I follow after her, and the nurse gowns and gloves me up. Katy is already at the table, talking with the scrub nurse and the intern who’s waiting on her.

I linger back, watching how she works, how she commands and runs her OR. She conducts the time out and then orders, “Ten blade, please,” without even acknowledging me. “Alexa, play Katy’s alternative mix,” she calls out, and some indie rock song that I’m not familiar with comes blaring from the speaker in the corner with a snarling guitar and upbeat, almost pop bass. “Yes. Good. Let’s do it.”

I’m not here to her. She’s one hundred percent focused on her work and on her patient. She makes a perfect incision, packing off and cauterizing any bleeders she can, and then has the scrub nurse use the retractors so she clearly visualizes the field.

She pauses, tilts her head, and emits a rueful sigh. “Well, that sucks.”

“Are you going to have to remove the spleen?” the intern whose name I don’t yet know asks.

“Yep. Tell me, Dr. Fields, why is the spleen so difficult to repair once it’s been lacerated?”

The intern falters for a moment. “Um. Because of its location beneath the rib cage? And because it’s, um, difficult to stop it from bleeding once it starts?”

Those come out like questions, and Katy nods. “Yes. Good,” she praises, and the guy preens like a show pony. “Both of those are accurate. But don’t forget that the spongy nature of the spleen makes it difficult to suture, it has minimal regenerative capacity unlike the liver, and there is a higher rate of postop complications like bleeding, infection, and clot formation. See.” She drags her instrument along the bleeding organ. “Once it starts, it doesn’t like to stop. But actually, the reason I said that sucks is because of this.”

“What is it?” Dr. Fields questions.

“Dr. Lawson, can you come here and give me a second opinion, please?”

I step forward and peer over the patient’s open abdomen. “What am I looking for?”

“This,” she tells me, briefly glancing up and meeting my eyes before returning to the surgical field. “Is this…”

I pick up the dissector and touch the small, firm mass on the liver. “It looks like your patient?—”

“Mr. Jacobs,” she inserts.

“Mr. Jacobs,” I correct. “It appears as if he’s very lucky he got into a car accident today. Though I suppose we won’t know for sure until we dissect it and have pathology take a look.”

“So that’s…”

“A tumor,” Katy tells Dr. Fields. “We’ll remove it and send it down to pathology to see if it’s benign or malignant, but the rest of his liver looks healthy and there was nothing on his labs that indicated it wasn’t. Which means, if it is cancer, we hopefully caught this very early.”

“Wow,” the intern says, his voice laced with awe. “That’s wild.”

“We’ll see. For now, let’s finish saving his life. Thank you, Dr. Lawson.”

I smirk beneath my mask at her dismissal of me. She wants to do this on her own. She wants to show off for her new boss, and I’m only too happy to let her.

Katy continues to work quickly and diligently, pressing her intern for answers to questions she continues to throw at him, and once the patient is stable and she’s getting ready to close, the circulating nurse asks her, “What was his thing?”

“Alexa, stop.” The music cuts out and Katy looks at her intern. “You can close. Have you ever done that before?”

He shakes his head.

“Okay. I’ll walk you through it.” She shows him how to staple and then steps back to allow him to work as she addresses the scrub nurse who asked her the question. “Mr. Jacobs trains service dogs. Every year or so, they bring a new dog into their home, and he trains it to be a good service animal for people with disabilities or medical conditions that benefit from them. That’s where they were headed this morning,” she continues. “To pick up a new dog to train.”

“That’s a really good one,” the nurse says. “Way better than that guy from last week. What was his name? The one who admitted to collecting doll heads because they remind him of his ex-girlfriend.”

Katy chokes on a laugh. “His name was Mr. Lawson.” Now it’s my turn to choke. Only I’m not laughing. Katy pins me with an amused stare. “I’m assuming they’re not related to you, Dr. Lawson. Unless you have a brother or cousin, we don’t know about.”

“No. Definitely not.” I hold my gloved hands up in surrender. “I’m an only child with no cousins, unlike you with your six hundred, and thankfully Lawson is a pretty common last name.”

Katy gives me a taunting shrug. “If you say so.”

Brat. “I definitely say so, Dr. Barrows.” I raise a pointed eyebrow at her since that’s all she can see of my face other than my eyes, but then I realize how harsh and stern I sounded and try to soften myself. “Doll heads? Really?”

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