Page 7

Dr. Lisa Patel wiped sweat from her eyes and sighed in exasperation. There was nothing to remind you that you weren't young anymore, like an eighteen-hour shift.

Her shift was only supposed to be ten hours, but the surgery had gone badly, and she’d spent six more hours fighting—and this time succeeding—in keeping her patient alive. Then she’d gone to her office, locked the door, and spent two hours weeping bitterly.

It wasn’t her fault. It couldn’t be her fault. She did everything right. She prescribed the correct medicines at the correct doses based on the patient’s medical history, age, weight, and sex. She’d made the incision beautifully and removed the tumor just as beautifully. So beautifully that she was confident that the cancer wouldn’t return.

Then the patient had coughed. He wasn’t supposed to do that. He was supposed to lie still on the bed until the anesthesia wore off, but instead, he had coughed, and when he had coughed, Lisa’s scalpel had nicked the posterior vena cava.

What followed were the second-most harrowing six hours of her life. She’d closed the wound, bound it, transfused three units of blood into an animal that could only hold four. Then she’d restarted his heart, six times.

And finally, the heart stayed strong. The patient stabilized, and Dr. Patel closed him up, calmly issued aftercare instructions, and then went to her office to prepare a report that she'd have to share with the owner.

At least Feisty had made it. Shooter hadn’t been so lucky.

She opened her car door, collapsed into her car seat and burst into tears again. Shooter was a service dog, a beautiful Golden Retriever who belonged to a patient of hers who suffered from PTSD after his long years of service in the military. That dog was his entire life, and he’d died on the table during a routine operation to remove a cyst from his gallbladder.

That time, it had been Lisa’s mistake. She hadn’t been careful with her scalpel, and she’d sliced his liver open too deeply to close.

She wept, thinking only of the dog and not the fact that her car door—which she locked religiously whenever she parked it—was unlocked when she opened it. She begged Shooter for forgiveness and didn’t see the figure sitting up in the back seat. She wiped tears from her eyes, and when she lowered her hand again, she didn’t register the sting the syringe made as it injected fifteen cc’s of pentobarbital into her neck.