The Doctor and Mr. Dylan

The Doctor and Mr. Dylan

by

Rick Novak

AMAZON KINDLE EDITION

* * * * *

PUBLISHED BY:

Pegasus Books/Rick Novak
on Amazon

The Doctor and Mr. Dylan

Copyright © 201
4 Rick Novak

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The Doctor and Mr. Dylan
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.  The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

To my parents

Jennie and John Novak

CHAPTER 1

GOING, GOING, GONE

first-degree murder n. an unlawful killing which is deliberate and premeditated (planned, after lying in wait, by poison or as part of a scheme)

My name is Dr. Nico Antone. I’m an anesthesiologist, and my job is to keep people alive. Nothing could inspire me to harm a patient. Alexandra Antone was my wife. Alexandra and I hadn’t lived together for nearly a year. I dreaded every encounter with the woman. I wished she would board a boat, sail off into the sunset, and never return. She needed an urgent appendectomy on a snowy winter morning in a small Minnesota town. Anesthetist options were limited.

Life is a series of choices. I chose to be my wife’s doctor. It was an opportunity to silence her, and I took it.

Before her surgery, Alexandra reclined awake on the operating room table. Her eyes were closed, and she was unaware I’d entered the room. She was dressed in a faded paisley surgical gown, and she looked like a spook—her hair flying out from a bouffant cap, her eye makeup smeared, and the creases on her forehead looking deeper than I’d ever seen them. I stood above her and felt an absurd distance from the whole situation.

Alexandra opened her eyes and moaned, “Oh, God. Can you people just get this surgery over with? I feel like crap. When is Nico going to get here?”

“I’m three feet away from you,” I said.

Alexandra’s face lit up at the sound of my voice. She craned her neck to look at me and said, “You’re here. For a change I’m glad to see you.”

I ground my teeth. My wife’s condescending tone never ceased to irritate me. I turned away from her and said, “Give me a few minutes to review your medical records.” She’d arrived at the Emergency Room with abdominal pain at 1 a.m., and an ultrasound confirmed that her appendix was inflamed. Other than an elevated white blood cell count, all her laboratory results were normal. She already had an intravenous line in place, and she’d received a dose of morphine in the Emergency Room.

“Are you in pain?” I said.

Her eyes were dull, narcotized—pinpoint pupils under drooping lids. “I like the morphine,” she said. “Give me more.”

Another command. For two decades she’d worked hard to control every aspect of my life. I ignored her request and said, “I need to go over a few things with you first. In a few minutes, I’ll give you the anesthetic through your IV. You won’t have any pain or awareness, and I’ll be here with you the whole time you’re asleep.”

“Perfect,” she oozed.

“When you wake up afterward, you’ll feel drowsy and reasonably comfortable. As the general anesthetic fades and you awaken more, you may feel pain at the surgical site. You can request more morphine, and the nurse in the recovery room will give it to you.”

“Yes. More morphine would be nice.”

“During the surgery you’ll have a breathing tube in your throat. I’ll take it out before you wake up, and you’ll likely have a sore throat after the surgery. About one patient out of ten is nauseated after anesthesia. These are the common risks. The chance of anything more serious going wrong with your heart, lungs or brain isn’t zero, but it’s very, very close to zero. Do you have any questions?”

“No,” she sighed. “I’m sure you are very good at doing this. You’ve always been good at making me fall asleep.”

I rolled my eyes at her feeble joke. I stood at the anesthesia workstation and reviewed my checklist. The anesthesia machine, monitors, airway equipment, and necessary drugs were set up and ready to go. I filled a 20 cc syringe with the sedative propofol and a second syringe with 40 mg of the paralyzing drug rocuronium.

“I’m going to let you breathe some oxygen now,” I said as I lowered the anesthesia mask over Alexandra’s face.

She said, “Remember, no matter how much you might hate me, Nico, I’m still the mother of your child.”

Enough talk. I wanted her gone. I took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and injected the anesthetic into her intravenous line. The milky whiteness of the propofol disappeared into the vein of her arm, and Alexandra Antone went to sleep for the last time.

CHAPTER 2

A PHARMACIST’S SON IN SOUTH DAKOTA

Eight months earlier

My cell phone pinged with a text message from my son Johnny. The text read:

911 call me

I was administering an anesthetic to a 41-year-old woman in an operating room at Stanford University, while a neurosurgeon worked to remove a meningioma tumor from her brain. I stood near my patient’s feet in an anesthesia cockpit surrounded by two ventilator hoses, three intravenous lines, and four computer monitor screens. Ten syringes loaded with ten different drugs lay on the table before me. My job was to control my patient’s breathing, blood pressure, and level of unconsciousness, but at that moment I could only stare at my cell phone as my heart rate climbed.                                 

911 call me

911?
My son was in trouble, and I was stuck in surgery, unable to leave. I wanted to contact Johnny as soon as possible, but my patient was asleep, paralyzed, and helpless. Her life was my responsibility. I scanned the operating room monitors and confirmed that her vital signs were perfect. I had to make a decision: should I call him now, or attend to my anesthetic and call after the surgery was over? My patient was stable, and my son was in danger. I pulled out my cell phone and dialed his number. He picked up after the first ring. “What is it, son?” I said.

“I’m screwed,” Johnny wailed. “I just got my report card for the first semester and my grades totally suck. Mom is mega-pissed. She’s going ballistic, and I’m screwed.”

My shoulders slumped. This was 911 for a 17-year-old? “How bad were the grades?”

“I got six B’s. I didn’t get one A. I just met with my counselor and he says I’m ranked #101 in my high school class. I’m so doomed. Mom is so pissed. She called me a lazy shit.”

I resisted my initial urge to scream at Johnny for scaring the hell out of me. The kid had no insight into what I did minute-to-minute in the hospital. Did he think his report card trumped my medical practice? Did he really think his report card full of B’s was an emergency?

“I’m not sure what’s worse, the grades or Mom’s screaming about the grades,” he said.

I imagined my wife having a temper tantrum about Johnny falling short of her straight-A’s standard of excellence, and I knew the answer to that question. My wife could be a total bitch. “I’m sorry Mom got mad, Johnny, but…”

“No buts, Dad. You know Mom’s idea of success is Ivy League or bust, and I’m a bust.”

“Son, four of your six classes are Advanced Placement classes, and those grades aren’t that bad.”

“Dad, almost everyone in the school takes four AP classes. Every one of my friends got better grades than me. Ray, Brent, Robby, Olivia, Jessica, Sammy, and Adrian all got straight A’s. Devon, Jackson, Pete, and Rod had all A’s and one B. Even Diego had only two B’s.”

“But you…”

Johnny cut me off. “There’s no ‘buts,’ Dad. I’m ranked in the middle of the pack in my class. I’m cooked. I’m ordinary. Forget Harvard and Princeton. I’m going to San Jose State.”

My stomach dropped. Johnny was halfway through his junior year at Palo Alto Hills High School. The competition for elite college acceptance was on my son’s mind every day, and on his mom’s mind every minute. Johnny was a bright kid, but the school stood across the street from Stanford University and was packed wall-to-wall with the sons and daughters of Stanford MBAs, PhDs, lawyers, and doctors. Johnny’s situation wasn’t uncommon. You could be a pretty smart kid and still land somewhere in the middle of the class at P.A. Hills High.

“Everything will work out,” I said. “There are plenty of great colleges. You’ll see.”

“Lame, Dad. Don’t talk down to me. You stand there with your doctor job at Stanford and tell me that I’ll be all right. I’ll be the checkout guy at Safeway when you buy your groceries. That’s where I’m heading.”

Catastrophic thinking. Johnny Antone was holding a piece of paper in his hand—a piece of paper with some letters typed after his name—and he was translating it into an abject life of being average.

“Johnny, I can’t talk about this any more right now. My patient …”

“Whatever,” Johnny answered.

I heard a click as he hung up. I hated it when he did that. In the operating room I had authority, and respect was a given. With my family, I was a punching bag for of all sorts of verbal blows from both my kid and my wife.

I reached down and turned off my cell phone. For now, the haven of the operating room would insulate me against assaults from the outside world.

Judith Chang was the neurosurgeon that day. Dr. Chang was the finest brain surgeon in the western United States, and was arguably the most outstanding female brain surgeon on the planet. She peered into a binocular microscope hour after hour, teasing the remnants of the tumor away from the patient’s left frontal lobe. Dr. Chang always operated in silence, and her fingers moved in precise, calculated maneuvers. A 50-inch flat screen monitor on the wall of the operating room broadcast the image she saw from inside her microscope.

I paid little attention to the surgical images, which to me revealed nothing but incomprehensible blends of pink tissues. My full attention was focused on my own 42-inch monitor screen which depicted the patient’s electrocardiogram, blood pressure, and oxygen saturation, as well as the concentration of all gases moving in and out of her lungs. Everything was stable, and I was pleased.

It had been five hours since the initial skin incision. Dr. Chang pushed the microscope away and said, “We’re done. The tumor’s out.”

“A cure?” I said.

“There was no invasion of the tumor into brain tissue or bone. She’s cured.” Dr. Chang had removed a 5 X 10-centimeter piece of the patient’s skull to access the brain, and began the process of fitting the piece back into the defect in the skull—the placement not unlike finishing the last piece in a jigsaw puzzle. As Dr. Chang wired the bony plate into place, she said, “How’s your family, Nico?”

She hadn’t said a word to me in five hours, but once she was finished with the critical parts of surgery, Judith Chang had a reputation as a world-class chatterer. Some surgeons liked to listen to loud rock n’ roll “closing music” as they sewed up a patient. Some surgeons preferred to tell raunchy jokes. Judith Chang enjoyed the sound of her own voice.  We hadn’t worked together for months, so we had a lot to catch up on.

“They’re good,” I said. “Johnny’s in 11th grade. He’s going to concerts, playing video games with friends, and sleeping until noon on weekends. Alexandra is working a lot, as usual. She just sold a house on your street.”