Had she been properly mindful of the good things? Every time she held that cranial bone flap in her hand she was performing a small miracle. There were surgeries she’d come to think of as routine and yet she was conscious of the fact that whenever she was near the brain or spinal cord, it was a matter of life and death.
There were some procedures and surgeries that were more memorable than others. There’d been that inoperable brain tumor in a seven-year-old that Maggie dared to remove. No one would touch that little girl, it was just too complicated and dangerous. And no surgeon liked performing an operation that was 99 percent likely to fail. Yet the child was headed to certain death with a very minimal chance of prolonging her life—and suffering—through radiation and chemotherapy. But Maggie was willing to risk it for the child’s sake. She’d once scrubbed in with a neurosurgeon who had excised a similar lesion. She had a very impressive team backing her up.
They had several pre-surgical conferences to discuss it before taking it on. There was doubt all around her but it had worked. That little girl not only survived, she was now perfectly healthy. It was a total success. The surgeon who had scrubbed in to assist was an older man and he said, “You have the most beautiful hands I’ve ever encountered.”
There was a cyclist thrown over the hood of a fast-moving truck, paralyzed from the neck down. Maggie took him into surgery and performed a partial cervical laminectomy and repair and when he woke up he could wiggle his toes. A month later he walked out of the hospital.
She was not by any means a religious person; she could count on one hand the number of times she’d been inside a church in the past four years. She did have a deep spiritual core and every time she went into the operating room she had a mantra: God, still my hand and clear my head. And when she came out she said, Thank you, God.
She had always scheduled her surgical cases for Tuesday and Thursday. She saw patients on Monday and Wednesday. She tried to take a couple of three or four-day weekends a month just to fill the well, catch up on her reading, organize her office and her head, but she was on call a couple nights a week. Blessedly she wasn’t always called in to the hospital and the occasions of being called to a major catastrophe like the MVA that had taken the lives of three youths were rare.
They had tried to prepare her in residency for the toll her specialty would take, yet it was more devastating than she had imagined. She had to fight the disappointment when things went poorly. Sometimes the emotion had driven her to the stairwell. And yet she met each new case with renewed vigor and enthusiasm—how?
She hoped the lawyer was going to talk about her good results, for she had them. Fantastic results, really. She was one of the best spinal surgeons in the area; many of her patients who were experiencing chronic pain realized complete relief and full mobility after surgery.
It was not in her nature to be negative. Why had she failed to remember all the victories?
Honesty and transparency make you vulnerable.
Be honest and transparent anyway.
—Mother Teresa
Chapter 13
Maggie had an early lunch with her primary lawyer, Steve Rubin. For once it was just the two of them, not the whole legal team plus a rep from the insurance carrier. They’d be before the judge at one o’clock and he warned her it might be a long afternoon. Both attorneys had already submitted all their paperwork, motions, witness lists, anything pertinent to this hearing. The judge would use all this information to determine the approximate length of the trial.
“Could the judge just throw it out today?” she asked hopefully.
“Very unlikely,” he said. “We’ve been in this process for a year and a half and if he were so inclined, that might’ve happened already.”
“Will you at least be able to bring up my exemplary record as a neurosurgeon?”
“Not until or if we get to closing arguments. Then, certainly. But I want to stay away from statistics if possible. I have expert testimony ready if necessary, but once we start talking about your saves we open the door to discuss your failures.”
She grimaced.
“I’m sorry to put it that way, Maggie. That’s not a very accurate conclusion, it’s just that the numbers in this specialty are bleak. Especially when it comes to emergency neurosurgery.
“Try very hard not to take this personally,” he said, and then launched into a short speech about motives and strategies and presentation, saying almost the same things Cal had said, that we mustn’t blame the plaintiffs for doing what they have to do. “We might suggest there is no blame here while there is access to considerable financial gain. But we’ll treat that with care—judges and juries don’t like the implication that we intend to hammer the grieving plaintiffs.
“On the other hand,” he said, “your malpractice carrier has not offered or agreed to a settlement, so without saying a word we imply we’re in for a fight. And I want you to be prepared, the judge we drew is not known to be sympathetic toward doctors. His record shows he decides most of these suits in favor of the plaintiffs.”