Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese Page A

thought.
    It was a well-kept secret that Stone had on three or four occasions since his arrival at Missing gone on a drunken binge. For a man who rarely drank, who loved his work, who found sleep a distraction, who had to be reminded to go to bed, these episodes were mystifying. They came with the suddenness of influenza and the terror of possession. The first patient on the morning list would be on the table, ready to be put under, but there'd be no sign of Stone. When they went looking for him the first time they found a babbling, disheveled white man, pacing in his quarters. During these episodes he did not sleep or eat, slipping out in the dead of night to replenish his supplies of rum. On the last occasion this creature had climbed the tree outside its window and perched there for hours, muttering like a cross hen. A fall from that height would have cracked its skull. Matron, when she had seen those bloodshot, mongoose eyes staring down at her, fled, leaving Sister Mary Joseph Praise and Ghosh to keep vigil and to try to talk him down, get him to eat, to stop drinking.
    As abruptly as it started, in two days, no more than three, the spell would be over, and after a very long sleep Stone would be back at work as if nothing had happened, never making any reference to how he'd inconvenienced the hospital, the memory of it erased. No one ever brought it up to him because the other Stone, the one who rarely drank, would have been hurt and insulted by such inquiry or accusation. The other Stone was as productive as three full-time surgeons, and so these episodes were a small price to pay
    Matron came closer. Stone's eyes were not bloodshot and he didn't reek of spirits. No, he was unhinged by Sister Mary Joseph Praise's condition, and rightly so. As Matron turned her attention from Stone to Sister Mary Joseph Praise, she nevertheless felt a ghost of satisfaction: at last the man had bared his soul, displayed his feelings for his assistant.
    Matron ignored Stone's ramblings about volvulus or ileus or pancreatitis or tuberculous peritonitis. “Let's go to the theater,” she said, and when they were there, she said, “Lay her on the operating table.”
    He set her down and Matron saw a sight she had seen seven years before: blood soaked Sister Mary Joseph Praise's dress in the region of her pubis. Matron's mind raced back to Sister Mary Joseph Praise's first arrival from Aden, and how blood on her habit then had caused similar concern. Matron had never asked the nineteen-year-old, point-blank, what caused the bleeding. The irregularity of the stain on that occasion had invited the observer to read meaning in its shape. Matron's imagination had constructed so many scenarios to explain that mystery. In the ensuing years, memory had changed the event from mysterious to mystical.
    Which was why Matron now glanced at Sister Mary Joseph Praise's palms and breast as Stone laid her down, as if she half expected to see bleeding stigmata, as if that first mystery had grown into this second mystery. But no, the only blood was at the vulva. Lots of blood. With dark clots. And bright red rivulets that ran down the thighs. Matron had no doubt, as blood dripped to the floor: this time it was secular bleeding.
    Matron seated herself between Sister Mary Joseph Praise's legs, willfully ignoring the stomach swelling that loomed in front of her. The labia were engorged and blue, and when Matron slid her gloved finger in, she found the cervix fully dilated.
    Of blood there was much too much. She swabbed and dabbed and pulled down on the posterior vaginal wall for a better view. When a piteous sigh emerged from her patient's lungs, Matron almost dropped the speculum. Matron's chest was pounding, her hands shaking. She leaned forward, tilted her head again to peer in. There, like a rock at the bottom of a mud pit, a stone of the heart, was a baby's head.
    “Lord, she's,” Matron said, when she could finally speak, gasping at the sacrilegious word