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what little free time he had alone. He wished he had the kids more and the money and time for a memorable vacation with them. He longed to spend more time in the gym. But one thing he never wanted to change was the rush of this moment, focusing years of training and experience into the awesome responsibilities of being a surgeon.
    Using his knee, he shoved the lever to the right, shutting off the water. Then, hands up, palms facing in, he backed into the OR, accepted a towel from the nurse, and dried his hands. Finally, he slipped into a sterile gown, allowed it to be tied, and thrust his hands into a pair of size 71⁄2 gloves. Time for battle.
    John Doe was stretched out on the table, covered with drapes that exposed only his abdomen, swabbed in russet antiseptic. Will could see and feel that the area had become even more distended. Just before he had entered the operating suite, he had received the blood-alcohol report—negative. That result, coupled with the negative head CT, strongly suggested overwhelming infection or massive blood loss into the abdomen as the cause of the profound shock and coma.
    “Ready, Ramon?” he asked the anesthesiologist, who peered over the drape separating his work space from Will’s and nodded. “Ready, everyone? Lydia? Okay, number-ten blade, please, Jennifer.”
    One by one Will sliced through three of the four layers of John Doe’s abdomen.
    “Suction ready,” he called out just as the fourth layer, the thin peritoneal membrane, parted beneath his blade. Under pressure, volumes of foul-smelling brown liquid spewed out of the abdominal cavity, a good deal of it overwhelming the suction and flowing down onto the floor. Will stepped back just in time to keep from irreparably soiling his trademark OR footwear—red Converse Chuck Taylor high-top sneakers.
    “Whew!” the circulating nurse exclaimed. “Deodorizer?”
    “Why not. And a pile of lap sponges, Jen, and more suction.”
    The circulator placed two drops of deodorizer on every person’s mask. One by one, Will inspected each organ—large and small bowel, kidneys, pancreas, liver, spleen, stomach, and gallbladder, even though the source of the problem was already quite apparent. Scar tissue from chronic inflammation caused by gallstones had shut off the blood supply to the large intestine, causing a foot-long section of it to become gangrenous and finally to split, spilling feces into John Doe’s abdominal cavity. Septic shock was the result.
    “Lydia?” he asked. “Where to from here?”
    The resident’s eyes were red from the onslaught of the fetid spillage. Will suspected that at least a corner of her brain was imagining life as a plastic surgeon—bowel contents versus Botox. No contest.
    “Isolate the diseased intestine, staple it off with a GIA stapler,” she said, “then control bleeding, irrigate the abdominal cavity clear with warm saline, and then go after the gallbladder first.”
    “The artery we need to tie off to get the gallbladder out?”
    “Cystic.”
    “Excellent. Go ahead and locate it. You sure you want to go into plastics?” Will could tell from her eyes that she was missing the glint in his. “Don’t bother answering that,” he said.
    He guided her through the removal of the gallbladder and then did the colon removal and colostomy himself. If by a miracle Mr. Doe survived this ordeal, the colostomy could be reversed some time in the future. With heavy bacterial contamination, it was best to leave the skin incision packed with dressings rather than to suture it closed. The scar would be impressive, but that, too, could be revised down the line. At the moment, it was life versus death, with death holding most of the high cards.
    Finally, it was done. A procedure fraught with potentially fatal pitfalls had just been completed quickly and virtually without a hitch, and every person working in OR 3 at that moment felt part of it.
    “Great job, Will,” the anesthesiologist called out as he