The monitor's alarm sounded sharp and piercing, like a dull knife being pulled repeatedly on my temple.
I stared at my mother's face on the operating table. The face that had become so thin due to chemotherapy was almost out of phase, but at this moment there was a strange serenity. The shadowless lamp illuminated every pore on her skin clearly visible, and I could even see that the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes still contained a few traces of tears that I missed when I wiped her face this morning. The hemostats were hot in my hands, and my fingernails turned bluish white from excessive force.
"Dr. Lin, the patient's blood pressure is still falling, 60/40!"
The circulating nurse's voice had a vibrato. I recognized her, Xiao Zhou, the little girl who was just assigned to our group this year. There was a small piece of iodine on the cuff of her white coat, which she probably accidentally got when pushing the medicine. What a clean child, it was his first major surgery for late-stage cancer, and his hands were shaking so much that he could barely hold the needle.
I took a deep breath, and the edge of the cold oxygen mask pressed against the bridge of my nose, allowing me to barely maintain the last bit of sanity.
"Continue the blood transfusion and increase the pressure." I heard my own voice, so calm that even I felt strange, "Prepare the electric knife, I'm going to cut out the tumor."
