Using the key, Noah opened the door. He stepped over the threshold and closed the door behind him. For a moment, he just stood there and surveyed the room. There were five desks. One was for Marjorie O’Conner, the surgical residency program manager. She ran the show from a bureaucratic standpoint. Another smaller desk was for the coordinator, Shirley Berensen. Her area of concentration dealt with managing the complicated evaluation requirements to make sure the program retained its accreditation and residents reached appropriate milestones. Another desk was for Candy Wong, also a coordinator, who oversaw the equally complicated issue of resident duty hours and the on-call schedule. Miss Wong had been the person whose attention Noah had spent so much effort avoiding after he had been threatened with dismissal for violating duty hours when he was a junior resident. For Noah, there was a certain irony that now he would be working closely with her.
There were two more desks, both smaller than the coordinators’. One was for the secretary, Gail Yeager, and the other for Noah. Looking at them, Noah had to smile. The irony here was that he and the secretary were probably going to be the busiest people in the surgical residency program and yet had the least impressive real estate. But the worst part, from Noah’s perspective, was not the size of his desk, which had no significance to him, but rather that his desk was completely out in the open, meaning there was no privacy whatsoever except after hours and on weekends. For something like the conversation he needed to have with Mark Donaldson, the venue was completely inappropriate. For such situations, Noah was going to be forced to improvise.
Two days ago when Claire had given him the key to the surgical residency program door, Noah had brought in office supplies, along with a significant amount of paperwork, including his very initial ideas for the choices of faculty mentors for each of the new first-year residents. Every new resident was assigned a faculty mentor. Even though Noah had never utilized his mentor other than enjoying a few pleasant dinners at the man’s home, he still thought the program had merit. There were always a couple of first-year residents who found adapting to the role of a surgical resident challenging. Being a resident was a world of difference from being a medical student.
Sitting down at the desk, Noah took advantage of the preternatural stillness of the deserted office. He got out the list of first-year residents and the list of faculty members who had volunteered to be part of the mentor program and went back to trying to match them. Quickly it became apparent that there was too much guesswork involved, because Noah knew very little about the new arrivals. The only thing he knew for certain was their genders and the medical schools they had attended. On the other hand, he knew the faculty members reasonably well, maybe too well in some instances.
When Noah had done what he could, he turned to managing and planning the plethora of meetings and conferences. Of particular concern was the weekly basic science lecture, since it was going to be the first conference under his tutelage and was fast approaching in less than a week. The basic science lecture was held every Friday at 7:30 A.M., and he had yet to decide on a subject for the first meeting, much less a lecturer. What he didn’t admit was that he was avoiding even thinking about the even more worrisome and problematic M&M Conference.
Time went by quickly, and before Noah knew it, the alarm on his cell phone went off, shocking him back to reality. It was quarter past eight. He’d set the alarm in the rare eventuality he wasn’t called, texted, or paged for some problem someplace in the hospital, which was what he fully expected. During the early morning, there was always something that happened that needed his attention. Certainly, had he stayed on the surgical floor, he would have been inundated. Taking full advantage of the peace and quiet, he’d made progress and had now outlined the first three basic science lectures and had emailed appropriate potential lecturers to ask if they would lend a hand.
After putting away his paperwork, Noah headed out the door. His destination was the Fagan Amphitheater in the Wilson Building, which was reached by a pedestrian bridge located on the second floor of the Stanhope.
3
SATURDAY, JULY 1, 9:27 A.M.
“Thank you, and welcome to the best surgical residency program in the world,” Dr. Edward Cantor said with a wry smile to acknowledge he might be exaggerating to a degree. He was a tall, slender, angular man, fit and assertively intelligent. He picked up his notes from the Fagan Amphitheater’s lectern and sat down in the chair he had vacated twenty minutes earlier. It was one of five in the amphitheater’s pit. The others were occupied by Dr. Carmen Hernandez, chief of surgery, and Dr. William Mason and Dr. Akira Hiroshi, both associate surgical residency program directors. The fifth chair was noticeably empty.
The welcoming ceremony had started precisely at 8:30 A.M. as scheduled. Noah had entered from the second floor prior to its commencement with several minutes to spare and looked down into the pit to see Dr. Hernandez waiting at the lectern for 8:30 to arrive. The chief was a compulsive man, especially about time. The room was built as a typical half-circle medical-school amphitheater, with tiers of seats rising from the half-circle pit or arena a full story below, making it look like an ancient Greek or Roman theater. The room was nearly full, with the twenty-four newly minted and obviously eager first-year residents sitting front and center in the first row. They all had on glaringly white, highly starched coats similar to Noah’s. Over the whole scene was a surprisingly loud buzz of conversation as a testament to the room’s fine acoustics.
As Noah had begun to descend one of the amphitheater’s two rather steep stairways that divided the seating into thirds, his arrival caught the attention of the chief of surgery, who waved up to him and gestured toward the only empty chair in the pit. Noah had quickly signaled that he preferred to sit in the audience. It had been a snap decision predicated on his seeing that the empty chair was next to Dr. Mason. As nervous as he was about speaking in front of the packed amphitheater, Noah had no interest in compounding his anxiety by having to relate to his least favorite attending, so he took an aisle seat in the twelfth row. The fact that the empty chair was also next to Cantor’s also played a role. After the man had threatened to dismiss him for spending too much time in the hospital as a junior resident, Noah had never felt at ease in his presence.
The program progressed just as Noah had predicted. Dr. Hernandez carried on for almost a half-hour, letting Noah’s mind wander to all his newly acquired responsibilities. Unable to avoid observing Mason down in the pit, wearing one of his typical expressions of disdainful disinterest when he was not the center of attention, Noah had found himself mostly worrying about the damn M&M Conference and how the hell he was going to navigate the minefield he knew it represented. He had successfully avoided thinking about it all morning, until Mason’s presence made it impossible.
After the chief of surgery had spoken, the program director followed suit in an equally predictable fashion, enough to make Noah marvel that no one in the audience fell asleep. He could tell that Dr. Mason was not finding the program particularly stimulating, either, as he was constantly fidgeting in his seat and crossing and uncrossing his heavy legs.