on the following Monday. His operating list was due to start at 8 a.m. sharp, so he wanted to be in the operating room by a quarter to eight. That would give him fifteen minutes to change into a scrub suit, have a few words with his waiting patient—the first on the list, who would be lying on a stretcher in the OR corridor outside his designated operating room—and scrub for the required number of minutes before putting on a sterile gown and gloves. Clay tried to have his life at the hospital organized almost down to each minute of the ten-hour day that he expected to put in there. That was just a routine day. Being a surgeon, it did not exactly allow for everything to be cut and dried—that was not in the nature of the job—yet he made the effort as though it were so. A surgeon had to be proactive, rather than reactive, ready to go at a moment's notice, ready to meet whatever challenge might present itself, knowledgeable and experienced enough to make the right decision at once.
