Chapter 7: Grand Rounds

The Whitcomb Auditorium held two hundred seats, and a hundred and twenty of them were full at eight in the morning.

I stood at the lectern in yesterday's scrubs with a clicker in my hand.

Desmond sat in the front row with his arms folded and his eyes on his knees.

Declan Maddox stood at the back by the door.

I put up my first slide, which was a photograph of a canvas tent with a plastic table inside it.

"This is the operating theater," I said. "It seats one surgeon, one assistant and one nurse, and it floods when it rains."

Somebody in the third row laughed.

I let it pass.

"Over three years I performed four hundred and twelve emergency operations there. I'd like to show you two."

I told them about a woman in obstructed labor who had walked two days to reach us.

The generator had quit mid-incision.

A boy of twelve had held a flashlight in his teeth for forty minutes while I delivered her baby.

I told them about a man whose leg had been crushed under a truck.

With no imaging, I had decided on the table that it had to come off.

I said that I had never been sure I was right, and that I had never stopped thinking about him.

The room had gone quiet by then.

When I finished, a senior attending in the fourth row stood up.

He was a heavy man with a pen in his breast pocket, and I recognized him as one of my father's old friends.

"Dr. Vaughan," he said, "I'll be frank.

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