The Six by Loren Grush EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Loren Grush
- Language: English
- Genre: Astrophysics & Space Science
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
But Only Men Can Be Astronauts
The sun was still hours away from coming up that morning, and Margaret
“Rhea” Seddon was already staring into the open abdomen of a patient on her
operating table. As per usual, she was trying to control the patient’s blood ow
and repair the damage to his organs, caused by a bullet that had violently ripped
through his gut. By now, she’d become used to such grisly sights. As a surgical
resident in John Gaston Hospital’s emergency room, she saw all manner of
gruesome gunshot and knife injuries, often the result of two angry men and too
much beer. EMS crews would wheel into the John—as the doctors called their
hospital—the victims of these bar brawls, typically in the middle of the night,
and they’d become Rhea or some other doctor’s priority for the rest of the
evening. Each night, the John’s emergency room would see so many trauma
patients that it would earn an even more menacing nickname: the pit.
Sometimes Rhea stanched the blood and sewed people up just ne; other
times she just couldn’t repair the sheer amount of damage.
Those moments were
the most devastating. This early morning, however, things seemed to be
progressing well, and she eventually stitched up her patient, sending him o to
the ICU. Her work wasn’t done, though. As the patient’s doctor, she still had to
keep her eye on him in case some unforeseen complication popped up. So she
headed to the doctors’ lounge, which sat adjacent to the ICU.
It was hard for her to believe, but there’d been a time when her presence in
the doctors’ lounge would have been a serious transgression. When she’d been a
surgical intern at Baptist Memorial Hospital, across the street from the John in
Memphis, Tennessee, she’d been barred from entering the doctors’ lounge. It
was for “men only,” and she was the only woman surgical intern at the time. The
head doctor told her the reason was that sometimes men walked around in their
underwear in the lounge. She told him it didn’t bother her, but he said the men
would be embarrassed.
Her superiors told her she could wait between surgeries
in the nurses’ bathroom. Rhea tried to change the policy, but she lost out and
found herself taking naps on a foldout chair in the bathroom, with her head
resting against the wall. The rule had prompted her to switch to the John for her
residency—a place that didn’t cling to such sexist policies.
Ever since she’d decided to go into medicine, Rhea always seemed to be out of
her comfort zone in some way. She’d grown up in a completely dierent world: a
small girl with straight blond hair in the upper-middle-class suburban town of
Murfreesboro, Tennessee. There, she followed the standard recipe for How to
Make a Proper Southern Lady.
She took the requisite ballet lessons from Miss
Mitwidie’s Dance Studio. She learned formal dining etiquette, played the piano,
sewed buttons on dresses, and planted herbs. Those skills were the ones her
mother, Clayton, had learned in her youth, and she was simply passing the torch
on to her daughter, molding Rhea into the only type of girl she knew how to
make
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