Page 5 of Knocked Up

"Talk to me."

"Red cell volume nineteen, solids four two." Marisol had the tube up to the light. "Lactate six point one."

"Great. Fantastic. Belly tap kit."

I put a needle in his belly and got blood. It did not clot, which was the answer.

"He's bleeding into his belly. Do we have a bag of Sixty-Two?"

"One unit. It expires in nine days."

"Then it's having the week of its life. Start it. Slow, and watch him."

I ultrasounded with the machine that had a crack down the screen from 2019, and there it was. It was big and ugly, sitting on the spleen with free fluid all around it.

"You want me to take the consent out?"

I looked at the swinging door.

"No. I'll do it."

There is a version of me who sends the technician out with a clipboard. That version had a whole life in which she never had to see this man again, and I killed her, in a hallway, with my own hands.

I went out and told him. It was fast and clean, the way I'd tell anybody. It is one of the two or three things I am actually good at.

He said okay after every sentence, with no argument and no bargaining.

Then he signed four documents without reading a word of any of them. I had a feeling I was in no way prepared for, and I shoved it somewhere with a broom.

Because I remembered. He read everything. He read the terms and conditions of a parking app out loud while I begged him to stop.

Then he said he's my grandfather's dog, and there was Walt in the middle of my waiting room ten years later. He was an old man in a paper hat behind a counter, saying sit down, honey, you look like a stray.

And because I have a mouth and no supervision, I told him about the Thursdays.

I got through the door before my face did anything. I had ten years to prepare an inventory of things I would not say to Beckett Douglas. That one was in the top four.

Surgery.

Gas him down and tube him. Clip and scrub and drape. By the time I was gowned his blood pressure had dropped to fifty-eight. The monitor was making the noise the monitor makes.

"Blood wide open. Bolus the hetastarch."

"That's the last bag."

"Then this is the thing we were saving it for."

I cut down the middle of him, and the second I was through the belly wall it came up over my gloves and onto the floor. Suction. Pack the quadrants. Find the stalk of vessels that feeds the spleen, which is like reaching into a bathtub in the dark for one specific fish.

"I've got it. Vessel sealer."

"It's charging."

"Fine. Give me the big clamps and a pack of suture. I'll do it like it's 1983."

Three throws and a knot, and my hands did not shake. I watched them do it from somewhere slightly above and behind my own head.

The spleen came out the size of a football with a ruptured knuckle on it. Marisol said "oh my god" with three syllables. I dropped it in a basin. "Bag it for the lab."