Nothing Lasts Forever by Sidney Sheldon

conversation was getting more unpleasant by the minute.
    “And you’d like to help me.”
    “Right.” He bared his tobacco-stained teeth. “Why don’t we discuss it at dinner?”
    “There’s nothing to discuss,” Paige said. “I’m not interested.”
    Arthur Kane watched Paige get up and walk away, and there was a baleful expression on his face.
    First-year surgical residents were on a two-month rotation schedule, alternating among obstetrics, orthopedics, urology, and surgery.
    Paige learned that it was dangerous to go into a training hospital in the summer for any serious illness, because many of the staff doctors were on vacation andthe patients were at the mercy of the inexperienced young residents.
    Nearly all surgeons liked to have music in the operating room. One of the doctors was nicknamed Mozart and another Axl Rose because of their tastes in music.
    For some reason, operations always seemed to make everyone hungry. They constantly discussed food. A surgeon would be in the middle of removing a gangrenous gall bladder from a patient and say, “I had a great dinner last night at Bardelli’s. Best Italian food in all of San Francisco.”
    “Have you eaten the crab cakes at the Cypress Club…?”
    “If you like good beef, try the House of Prime Rib over on Van Ness.”
    And meanwhile, a nurse would be mopping up the patient’s blood and guts.
    When they weren’t talking about food, the doctors talked about baseball or football scores.
    “Did you see the 49ers play last Sunday? I bet they miss Joe Montana. He always came through for them in the last two minutes of a game.”
    And out would come a ruptured appendix.
    Kafka, Paige thought. Kafka would have loved this.
    At three in the morning, when Paige was asleep in the on-call room, she was awakened by the telephone.
    A raspy voice said, “Dr. Taylor—Room 419—a heart attack patient. You’ll have to hurry!” The line went dead.
    Paige sat on the edge of the bed, fighting sleep, and stumbled to her feet. You have to hurry! She went into the corridor, but there was no time to wait for an elevator.She rushed up the stairs and ran down the fourth-floor corridor to Room 419, her heart pounding. She flung open the door and stood there, staring.
    Room 419 was a storage room.
    Kat Hunter was making her rounds with Dr. Richard Hutton. He was in his forties, brusque and fast. He spent no more than two or three minutes with each patient, scanning their charts, then snapping out orders to the surgical residents in a machine-gun, staccato fashion.
    “Check her hemoglobin and schedule surgery for tomorrow…”
    “Keep a close eye on his temperature chart…”
    “Cross-match four units of blood…”
    “Remove these stitches…”
    “Get some chest films…”
    Kat and the other residents were busily making notes on everything, trying hard to keep up with him.
    They approached a patient who had been in the hospital a week and had had a battery of tests for a high fever, with no results.
    When they were out in the corridor, Kat asked, “What’s the matter with him?”
    “It’s a GOK,” a resident said. “A God only knows. We’ve done X-rays, CAT scans, MRIs, spinal taps, liver biopsy. Everything. We don’t know what’s wrong with him.”
    They moved into a ward where a young patient, his head bandaged after an operation, was sleeping. As Dr. Hutton started to unwrap the head dressing, the patient woke up, startled. “What…what’s going on?”
    “Sit up,” Dr. Hutton said curtly. The young man was trembling.
    I’ll never treat my patients that way, Kat vowed.
    The next patient was a healthy-looking man in his seventies. As soon as Dr. Hutton approached the bed, the patient yelled, “Gonzo! I’m going to sue you, you dirty son of a bitch.”
    “Now, Mr. Sparolini…”
    “Don’t Mr. Sparolini me! You turned me into a fucking eunuch.”
    That’s an oxymoron, Kat thought.
    “Mr. Sparolini, you agreed to have the vasectomy,