Storm Prey Read Free Page B

said.
    He and her husband, Lucas, who got along improbably well, once spent an hour talking about men’s fashion, nearly driving Weather crazy with the inanity of it. She’d said, “Fifteen minutes on loafers? Loafers?”
    “We were just getting started,” Lucas said. She wasn’t sure he was joking.
     
     
    “So . . . NO CHANGE,” Maret said.
    “Not as long as everything goes right,” said John Dansk, a neurosurgeon. “If we run into trouble splicing the six vein, if we lose it, we may have to take out another piece and that means rolling Sara this way and Ellen will torque back to the right.”
    The six vein was a vein shared by the twins. They’d tie it off on Ellen’s side, and attempt to splice it into the five vein on Sara’s, the better to move blood out of Sara’s brain. The vein numbers simply came from imaging charts prepared by the radiologists.
    “So what are you suggesting?” Maret asked. He glanced at Weather: “You are gorgeous this morning.”
    “I know,” she said, to make him laugh. As did the other women around him, she liked to make him laugh.
    Dansk scowled at them and said, “I’m suggesting that we slice a few wedges out of the base of the mold, so that we can use them as shims if we have to brace one of the kids.”
    “Why not have a nurse hold her?” Maret asked.
    “Because we might be talking a couple hours, if worse comes to worse.”
    “You know how much that mold cost?” Maret asked.
    “About one nine-thousandth of your annual salary,” Dansk said.
    Maret shrugged. “So, we cut a few wedges. Why not? If we need them, we have them, and if we don’t, it won’t matter.”
    “Should have thought of this before now,” said Rick Hanson, an orthopedic surgeon who would make the bone cuts through the kids’ shared skull. He seemed shaky; he’d invented a half-dozen little saws for this operation and would be the focus of a lot of attention. Because of the way the children’s skulls intersected, they formed a complex three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle—basically, an oval ring of bone—of which he’d be removing only a few pieces at a time. Normally the cutting would have been done by the neurosurgeon, with drills and flexible wire saws. Hanson, from Washington University in St. Louis, had developed his own set of electric saws matched to jigs—cutting templates—for complicated bone cuts. Maret had decided that Hanson’s technique would be ideal, and would make it possible to prepare perfectly fitted composite plates to cover the holes in the babies’ skulls.
    “We’re just nervous,” Maret said now. “That’s normal.” Maret was the team leader, the one with all the experience. He’d done two other craniopagus separations, one in France, one in Miami. Of the four children involved, two had survived—one from each operation. When he talked about the work, he talked mostly about the children who’d died.
     
     
    ANOTHER DOC PUSHED into the room, followed by a second one. They had all kinds—anesthesiologists, radiologists, neurosurgeons, cardiologists, plastic and orthopedic surgeons, and a medical professor who specialized in anatomical structures of the skull, as it pertained to craniofacial reconstruction. They had twenty nurses and surgical assistants.
    Weather said to Dansk, the neurosurgeon, “If you want to cut those wedges, you better get it done: they’ve got to start cleaning the place up.”
    Dansk said, “I’m on it,” and, “I need a scalpel or something. Anybody got an X-Acto knife?”
     
     
    ABOVE THE TABLE, in an observation room behind a canted glass wall, people were beginning to filter into the stadium seating.
    A nurse came into the OR—one of the sterile nurses—and said, “I wanted to see if we could make the move one more time.”
    She wanted to practice breaking the tables apart, so that when the final cut was made, and the twins were separated, they could be moved to separate operating areas for the fitting of the new