“No, Dr. Reynolds. All of my questions have been answered. I’m just ready for this extra skin to be gone.” Mrs. Lyons lifted her left arm, wiggling it, demonstrating the extra skin that sagged against her muscle. A result of her extreme weight loss.
“Very well. Everything looks good here. I’ll see you in there.” With that, Dr. Reynolds turned and headed out of the room, not even acknowledging me or the two additional staff who just entered the room.
“He’s not too friendly but he’s a master with a scalpel,” Mrs. Lyons stated, smiling.
“Hm.”
“He’s not too bad to look at either.” She wiggled her eyebrows and giggled like a woman half her age with a crush.
“I wouldn’t know,” I stated as I pulled out my pen and began writing down some notes on Mrs. Lyons’ chart.
“Aw c’mon. I may be older than you by about thirty years but I’m not dead!”
My gaze fell to the age on Mrs. Lyons’ chart. She wasn’t too far off, given her age was fifty-seven. She was about twenty-six years older than my current age.
“You’re nowhere near dead, Mrs. Lyons.”
“Sure ain’t! And I dropped that weight, plus another two hundred pounds once I divorced that good for nothing husband of mine. At fifty-seven, I’m feeling better than I have in the last twenty-years. And as soon as Dr. Reynolds gets rid of these bat wings of mine …” she paused to lift both her arms, swinging the extra skin hanging from them, “I’m back on the market. This time I’m looking for a younger man.”
I giggled along with her. “Okay, Mrs. Lyons. Let’s get you into surgery and healed before all of that.”
Folding her arms across her abdomen, she nodded. “I wouldn’t try anything with Dr. Reynolds though. He’s mean. Nice to dream, however.”
I shook my head and rolled my eyes. I could tell Mrs. Lyons was enjoying her new life.
The other staff and I spent the next twenty minutes prepping Mrs. Lyons for surgery prior to rolling her out of the room. I headed to the washroom right outside of operating room number two, where this surgery would be taking place. As I pushed through the door, I caught a glance of Dr. Reynolds just before he exited the washroom and entered the threshold of the surgical room. For the slightest moment he hesitated as he stared at me over the mask covering the lower half of his face. He studied me as if trying to figure out a puzzle.
The strangest emotion overcame me. I felt saddened by the fact that I couldn’t see those pink lips of his.
“Get yourself together, Grace,” I admonished, shaking my head and turning on the fountain to thoroughly scrub my hands. Minutes later, I was entering the operating room, sterile, masked up, cap covering the low bun I’d pulled my curly strands into, and ready for surgery.
“Are we holding you up?”
The entire room fell silent and I felt all eyes on me.
I glanced up to see Dr. Reynolds staring down at me through the clear part of his face mask. Obviously, his snarky question had been directed at me.
I straightened my back and stared at him the same way he was staring at me. “No more than you’re holding Mrs. Lyons’ surgery up. She’s really looking forward to getting rid of those bat wings, so let’s get to it, shall we?” I smiled, but since I had on a face mask, no one could actually see it. However, I assumed the narrowing of my eyes from the grin was enough to get my point across.
One of Dr. Reynolds’ dark, almost black, eyebrows lifted, as if he was surprised that I’d dared to speak back to him. I got the inclination he wanted to respond but he held himself back.
Snorting, I moved to the side of the operating table, standing behind and to the right of Dr. Reynolds, closest to the table holding the surgical instruments. I peeked over at Mrs. Lyons whose eyes were closed as the oxygen mask covered her face. I glanced up at the head of the table and winked at Dr. Atkins, one of my favorite anesthesiologists at Memorial Hospital.
I caught the wrinkle in the chestnut brown skin around his eyes, his grey beard covered by his mask.
“Let’s begin. Nurse, the patient’s vitals,” Dr. Reynolds stated abruptly, breaking the silence in the room.
Directing my attention to the monitors, I read them loud and clear, for the room to hear. After going through the procedure that was to be taking place, and correctly identifying the parts of the body that were to be operated on, the surgery began.
I carefully kept my eye on the patient’s vitals and assisted by providing suctioning for Dr. Reynolds so he could see where he was cutting and stitching. And while he was at times gruff with his direction on telling me where and when to suction, the five-hour surgery went rather smoothly. As Mrs. Lyons was being wheeled out of the operating room, I followed the bed, keeping a close eye on her vitals and then charting them once we made our way into the recovery room.
“Oh, nurse?”
I turned to see a woman who appeared to be about the same age as me with long, red, curly hair coming toward me.
“Were you in there with my mom?”
I lifted an eyebrow. “And your mother would be?”
