It wasn’t Chao’s fault as far as I could see. The patient was seventy-eight years old and, from what I read from the case file I was given, was not a great candidate for surgery anyway: old, frail, and had more than one operation before. In my opinion this operation wasn’t going to make him any better. All it was going to do was make sure the time he had left was going to be more awful. He was going to be recovering from massively invasive surgery rather than doing anything else he’d want to do with his life, which was probably anything else.

But Chao was right. I’m not a surgeon, or a doctor, or a nurse. I could be entirely wrong about the value of this particular operation. I wasn’t involved with, or didn’t pretend to understand, the intricacies of what they did with their hands inside the open cavity of this man’s chest.

All I had was my experience observing hundreds of operations, and at least a couple dozen just like Chao was now attempting. When the patient was wheeled into the room and my observation of him dovetailed into what I knew from the case file, my gut told me that the good doctor’s streak of not needing someone like me in the room was going to end.

To be fair to her, for six hours she was quite competently proving me wrong.

But Hour Seven was about the patient’s body showing Chao there was a limit to what competence could do confronted with a body that was actively trying to self-destruct. The patient began to react to the anesthetic. Then he began to seize. Then it became clear that the patient, as sometimes happened with open heart surgery, was having a stroke.

All of this happened within five minutes.

Chao was a good surgeon as far as my layman’s eye could see—good in the chest, good with her hands and good, if short, with her team. But after a few minutes of this, it stopped being about her or her obvious talents. It was about whether anyone anywhere could save this patient from the death that was so clearly on its way.

During these five minutes of turmoil, I was doing what I had been doing for the previous six hours: standing there quietly, being the hole in the air I promised Chao I would be. The difference was now I was no longer just standing. I was waiting. Waiting for the sign that would tell me it was time to get involved.

I waited, relaxed. It wouldn’t be long now.