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the dressing rooms, where the face masks were boxed, was as close as they got to food on such days. His only sitting moments were taken up in rapid fire robotic dictations of surgical detail of the just completed procedure rammed into which ever of the several telephone transcription devices were free. Saltine crackers stuffed into the mouth do wonders for rapid speech and operative reports. Kathy was telling the parents what that high speed word burst that just came from the doctor really meant. " No. That's good. That's what we want. Con-tain-ment is good." Containment does sound a bit like contaminant. The next mother was already dressed in a paper suit to allow her to accompany her child into the operating suite. It took just moments and the next child was asleep and mother guided out of the operating room. Kathy's cooking class discussion picked up again as if it were a tape recording placed on hold and someone pressed play. "I'm not into buns," drew a laugh. Soon, hands were moving to subtle gestures. This is how the day went, hectic but controlled by interlocking and layered routines. It was in this pace, this blur, that totally unaware, his very first summons to recall what seemed to be an irrelevant and lapsed past began. It was with an innocent sounding, though unusual, message piped into the operating room. A sign? You bet. Even so, in the final details of his last of eight surgeries, he was still energetically into his art with little else on his mind than just finishing - that and meeting his wife Mina at the nearby Irish Pub where the corned beef stands up to the beer. A surgeon's life is fragmented and dispersed through his duties. So there are OR protocols for everything, including social. All he had to do was ask one of the nurses to relay a few words to Mina. With his operative equipment set-up cards, they also had a