Chapter 13
THIRTEEN
LORENZO
The thing about doing the right thing, morally speaking, was that it never brought the right results.
Lorenzo knew his takedown of the idiotic Tom Jackson would ruffle feathers.
He didn’t care about that. What he hated was the attention it brought him.
Granted, Dr. Bahrani-Jones and Dr. Kharal were surrounded by colleagues after the talk.
But so was he, for a few congratulatory slaps on the back and “good for you” type of comments.
Dr. Damian Hughes, the obsequious ass-kisser, approached.
“Perfectly stated, Lorenzo,” he boomed. “And thank you for the shout-out. Nice to know you’re an ally.
I’ve been creating an outreach program to Stanford Medical, trying to encourage other people of color to shadow me for a day or so in surgery, and—”
“Good,” Lorenzo said. “Excellent. Please excuse me.” He ran the same kind of program, actually, and had written an article for the New England Journal of Medicine about the need for more, but he hated this kind of virtue signaling.
He also knew that as a leader in the field, he had a duty to participate in the conversation.
Carol van Thynge, a colleague from his residency at Yale, raised her glass at him from the bar, and he gave a nod as he felt his neck stiffening.
God, he’d do anything right now to have his hands on a hemorrhaging abdominal aorta.
Better than all these people looking at him.
Where was Winnie? He’d love to see someone who wasn’t a surgeon.
“Time for your presentation,” she said, suddenly at his side. He startled a little. “You good?” she asked.
“It’s very crowded in here,” he said, glancing around the lobby. A bar had been set up on the terrace, a beautiful, glassed-in space, and many of the doctors were not shy about day drinking.
“Yes, well, conferences will do that. Let’s head over and I’ll double-check the connection for your PowerPoint, okay?”
“Lorenzo! It’s about time someone told that old fart to go to hell!” came a voice. Miguel Rivera, chief of surgery at Houston Methodist.
“Yes,” Lorenzo said. “Well.”
“And who is this?” Miguel asked.
“My assistant, Winnie Smith.”
“Hello,” said Winnie, her face neutral. He really liked that about her. No gushing, no ass-kissing, no trying to make an impression.
“Lovely to meet you, Winnie, and it’s about time someone helped this man manage his time. I don’t think he ever sleeps!”
“Good to see you, Miguel,” Lorenzo said.
“Listen, I wanted to talk to you about establishing a sort of exchange program between our hospitals. Do you have ten minutes?”
“Sure,” he said. No time to run through his notes or ensure his PowerPoint was working. “Winnie, can you—”
“Already on it,” she said, and walked off.
* * *
The room was standing room only for his lecture.
He’d known it would be. He was, after all, perhaps the world’s leading expert on this topic.
At least, the nation’s leading expert. But definitely in the top five worldwide.
He wasn’t bragging. It was simply true. He’d graduated from high school at sixteen, college at nineteen, flew through medical school, getting his Ph.D.
and M.D. the same year (thanks, Harvard).
He then skipped to the head of the line for surgical residency, and by the end of his first year, had already proved himself (again) as intellectually gifted and remarkably adept with a scalpel.
He’d been called rockstar, ninja, wizard, ace, cowboy, hotshot, and superstar.
There were surgeons, and there were gods, and Lorenzo was one, and he knew it.
Which actually meant life outside of a hospital was strange and uncomfortable for the most part.
Not many people understood his world. They could not appreciate the delicacy, the hand-eye coordination, fine motor control, the 3-D mental mapping of anatomy, the ability to interpret imaging in a nanosecond, the critical thinking, the grace under pressure, the focus, the almost psychic sense of what was about to happen.
But this crowd knew. Here, he could teach.
Here, he didn’t have to flay a lazy resident.
This crowd had already earned their chops, or were in the process of it.
Dr. Khalal was in the front row, and Dr. Bahrani-Jones gave him a nod as she sat down.
Damian Hughes was also in the front row, the better to be seen.
His assistant was at his side, pressing a bottle of water into his hand, whispering into his ear, head bowed. Lorenzo was glad Winnie didn’t do that.
After the moderator gave his lengthy bio, Lorenzo approached the microphone stand.
The introductory page of his presentation was already on the screen, and he realized he hadn’t looked at the updated version, given the humiliating hangover that caused him to oversleep.
Winnie had jazzed it up, as she’d put it in her email.
The font was a basic but elegant serif, the colors navy and white, with statistics in yellow.
She had resized the photos and framed them so they were easier to see.
Lorenzo never ad-libbed or went off course. He knew what he had to say, and it was all spelled out right there on his laptop. “Good afternoon,” he said and got to work.
As he clicked through, discussing abscesses and ischemia, fistulas and vascular injury, he fell into the language of his chosen field. The audience was scribbling notes, tapping into their laptops, murmuring. A few hands were raised, but Lorenzo only took questions at the end as a rule.
“And with that, mesenteric perfusion is preserved,” he said, finishing up that slide.
“Next, of course, is this rare but not unheard-of complication.” He frowned, not recognizing the words as what he’d written.
He clicked, then, not understanding what he was seeing on his screen, turned to look at the big screen.
A wave of laughter rolled through the room.
It was a cartoon, likely from the New Yorker or something like it, showing an OR, a surgical team standing over a patient. The caption showed the doctor saying, “Everyone be quiet, and the nurse will call my phone.”
He looked up, and the laughter increased. Why? He was not smiling. He hadn’t even put that in there. He—
Winnie stood in the back, near the exit, and she was looking at him. She pointed to her mouth and smiled, wordlessly instructing him to do the same.
A mild panic wrapped in coldness gripped his chest. A cartoon? Humor? In his presentation? It was so unprofessional. The laughter was confusing, so out of context during one of his lectures. Winnie pointed more vigorously to her bared teeth.
Di’ qualcosa, idiota, he heard his grandmother’s voice saying. Not that she ever called him idiot, but yes, he should speak.
“Just one more reason to leave your phones in your lockers,” he said, his voice neutral. Another laugh rippled through the crowd. “Moving on to metabolic failure.”