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“No, I did my surgery residency at Duke. Then I did my trauma surgery and critical care fellowship at Grady in Atlanta. I did a follow-up year at Cook in Chicago. I wanted to go to a large city to get firsthand experience with gunshot wounds, thoracic and abdominal trauma.”
“Oh,” I said again. I was beginning to sound like a moron. If I didn’t come up with something more than oh, he would think I was brainless. “That’s a little above my head,” I admitted.
He waved his hand. “It’s fine. It’s above most people’s heads. What I wanted to do was to get a lot of hands-on experience working on victims of gunshot wounds to the chest, neck, and abdominal area. They tend to be fairly, um, messy. I figured I would get that in a large city which is why I chose Atlanta and Chicago.”
“That makes sense when you put it that way.”
“There’s also a lot of expressway trauma, car accidents and the like.”
“I see. Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Doesn’t that stuff gross you out?” I scrunched up my face because just the thought of it all disgusted me.
He threw back his head and belted out a hearty laugh.
“No. It’s a good thing too. Can you imagine your doctor coming in and going, ‘Eww! That’s gross!’”
I tried to laugh, but it hurt too bad. “Yeah, that would be bad.”
“You get used to it. At first, it’s kind of weird looking at all the tissue and bones, but then you get past it. Trauma surgery does have a different aspect of that than general surgery.”
“Okay, I get it.” I grimaced. I was getting queasy just listening to him.
“Sorry, I forget that people don’t like to hear that kind of thing. Can I check your belly?”
“What!” What in the world!
He dropped his head and rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m sorry. That wasn’t very professional. What I meant was would you mind if I took a look at your wounds to see how they’re progressing? That really came out badly, didn’t it?”
I giggled. Then I tried to laugh. Then he laughed too. I had to grab my stomach because laughing made me hurt.
“I thought you wanted to blow a raspberry on it or something.”
We laughed again.
“Well, if you want me to, I can.”
This conversation had gotten extremely comfortable. I was surprised at that too.
“Um, Pearce, I don’t have on any underwear with that disgusting catheter.”
“Oh, right. Let me get Sharon in here for a minute.”
“Sharon?”
“Your nurse.”
He left and returned minutes later with the nurse, and she had a sheet in her hand. She shooed him out for a second and she tugged my gown up and draped the sheet over my bare lower half. Then she called him in.
He pranced in and pulled on some latex gloves. Sharon brought in some wound supplies and placed them on the bed. He removed the bandages over the two places where I’d been stabbed and the incision where they repaired my spleen. He inspected them closely until I wanted to ask if he found something there.
“Everything is looking good. Nice and neat. Healing well. No signs of infection.” He replaced the bandages with new ones and pulled my gown down for me. Then he covered me back up and Sharon left.
“Did you see me naked?” I blurted out.
“Excuse me?”
