Dead Wrong by Allen Wyler

sentenced you to a life filled only with depression.

    W YSE SWEPT FROM bay to bay through the trauma ICU, an entourage of residents and med students in his wake. He stopped at the head of the next bed and waited for his eager audience to crowd around him. And in the hard-ass drill-sergeant tradition of neurosurgery, he taught. Everyone—from nursing students to the first-year general surgery residents forced to suffer through three-month stints on his service—became fair game. He despised the general surgery residents, seeing their short tour through neurosurgery as a waste of time for all involved. Three lousy months wasn’t enough to teach them anything about the specialty. He settled, instead, for beating into them a distinction between high-priest neurosurgeons and, say, knuckle-dragging orthopods.
    He pointed at a med student, a cute little Hispanic number ( Boy, I’d love to fuck her .) with black hair in a ponytail and a dark brown mole to the right of her pert little nose, and asked, “Look at the patient and tell me his diagnosis.”
    She glanced at the resident standing to her left, but apparently realized all eyes were now on her. “I, ah …” She glanced again at a resident for help.
    “No. No passing this off. I want you to tell me. Diagnosis, please.” Wyse drilled the first-year resident with an admonishing look, warning him to not take pity on her by giving away the answer.
    The student’s face reddened as she shifted weight to the other leg and fiddled with the new stethoscope draped around her neck. Finally, with a helpless shrug, she said, “I don’t know.”
    “You don’t know?” Wyse’s words dripped shock. Slowly, he scanned the group. The chief resident—an eight-year veteran of Wyse’s boot-camp mentality—had his hands clasped serenely behind his back and an impassive look in his eyes.
    Wyse’s gaze drifted back to the student. “Look at his eyes, Gonzales. What do you see?”
    Her blush intensified. “They … they’re swollen.”
    “Come on, come on.” He checked the wall clock to see how much time remained before he could leave to deal with the phone messages he knew were piling up on his desk. Important people received important calls.
    “I … don’t know.”
    “Oh yes you do. Look at the damn patient, girl.” He felt himself losing patience with her. All she had to do was tell him what everyone could see. “His eyes are swollen and …”
    “They’re black-and-blue?” she offered meekly.
    “Yes!” He paused. “Swollen and black-and-blue. What does this tell us?”
    She looked up at him, those big brown eyes surrendering. Ha! That vulnerable doe routine might work on others. Not him. She was going to learn this, goddamn it.
    “I don’t know.”
    He nodded at his chief resident to explain a bit of knowledge anyone entering a neurosurgery residency would know by the end of the first day.
    The resident snapped back from his short mental vacation. “The term is raccoon eyes because the bruising resembles a raccoon’s mask. The bruising results from fractures around the base of the orbit. Hence, this pattern is diagnostic for a basal skull fracture. That’s the diagnosis Dr. Wyse was asking for, but in this patient, that’s not the only neurologic diagnosis.”
    Wyse decided to salvage the remains of his schedule by cutting rounds short. His chief resident’s answer filled him with pride. As a first-year trainee that clown had choked every time he was placed in a similar situation as Gonzales. Now look at him. He had been turned into a good teacher. The ability to express clinical information clearly and succinctly was the most fundament skill needed to pass the oral board exam. And Wyse made damn sure none of his graduates ever flunked their orals.
    Wyse gave the resident a fatherly pat on the shoulder. “You’re doing such a fine job; why don’t you finish up for me? I’ll catch up with you later.”
    Wyse pushed through the ICU doors intent on