He nearly choked on the words. Nearly choked on the guilt that had followed him around like a dark cloud ever since he’d failed to save his sister’s life.
‘I don’t think so.’ She shook her head.
‘Then what?’
‘I don’t think it’s hyperfocus, ADD, ADHD or whatever else schoolteachers, doctors, other professionals may have told you—and don’t get me wrong, I know those conditions are very real for some kids, but not for Brady.’
‘So what, in your professional opinion, is it?’
He heard the edge of sarcasm in his tone, just as he heard the edge of desperation and hope.
‘It’s nothing.’ She shrugged. ‘At least, not like you’re thinking. But you don’t have to take my word for it. How about when you have a free moment today, maybe between operations, you bring him to VenomSci’s visitor centre and we’ll find out?’
* * *
‘Music, please,’ Jake requested, making the first incision as the first song on his playlist filled the operating room.
At least with this, his first teaching operation instead of just lecture room talks and video presentations, he finally had something to really get his teeth into, and switch his head off from Silvio Delgado’s most recent shenanigans.
And from more run-ins with Flávia.
Why the heck had he gone at her so hard in the cafeteria? He could pretend it had been about protecting Brady, but he knew that wasn’t it.
No, he’d been making a point of proving to her—and, more pertinently, himself—that their night together had been a one-off. That he harboured no lingering desires.
He knew it was a lie. Still, he wasn’t certain how taking Brady to VenomSci’s visitor centre was designed to help, but there was a part of him which welcomed the opportunity just to change the dialogue between them.
‘I realise you’ve been thrown in at the deep end on this case and haven’t had a chance to do surgical rounds on the patients in my clinical trial.’ He glanced up at the new surgical intern, after a while. ‘But it will be a great learning opportunity for you. So talk me through what you do know about this patient.’
It wasn’t the intern’s fault that Delgado had stirred things up by claiming the intern, who had been shadowing Jake for the past week, for a surgery of his own this afternoon. Typical Delgado, still smarting from Jake’s perceived snub at the Welcome Gala, and trying to stamp his authority all over the hospital.
‘The patient is a thirty-five-year-old female. She has dermatofibrosarcoma protuberans—a rare type of soft-tissue sarcoma developing in the deep layers of the skin.’
‘So how would you normally expect to operate on the patient?’ Jake asked, his eyes on the patient and the image on the monitors.
‘Resect the tumour by cutting a two-centre margin around the sarcoma. If they come back negative, then you’ve cleared the tumour and there’s a very low chance that the cancer should return.’
‘Good,’ Jake confirmed, continuing his work until he was satisfied. ‘Now what we’re actually going to do is this...lights, please.’
As the OR went dark, the familiar glow could be seen on the patient’s body. As Jake had anticipated, the dye showed the sarcoma to clearly be larger than images had been able to identify, reaching out in multiple directions and travelling from the dermis, quite deeply down.
‘So there it is.’
The intern peered in.
‘It’s like our own personal markers,’ he breathed.
‘Right. No guesswork needed. No taking healthy tissue unnecessarily as part of the margins. But more significantly, no inadvertently leaving behind unidentified tumour, thinking that we’ve actually got it all. DFSP is one of those sarcomas where local recurrence is particularly common if the resection is incomplete.’
‘So no intraoperative freezing to cut sections for biopsy?’
‘We’ll still do that as we resect the tumour, then we’ll close with a skin graft, and follow up with vacuum sealing negative pressure drainage.’
* * *
Flávia watched Jake usher Brady through the doors of the centre and told herself that she didn’t really feel her pulse hammering through her veins like air in the old radiator system of her first city apartment.
Especially pretending that she didn’t feel it pulsing at her neck, her nipples, her core.