The first complex case was a forty-year-old pack elder who had been managing a bone infection following a sporting injury. Conservative treatment for three weeks. The imaging Bettany had been monitoring showed the infection reaching a threshold where conservative was no longer conservative — it was delay.
She went in Wednesday morning.
The surgery took three hours and nineteen minutes.
She didn't think about anything except the surgery. That was the thing people outside medicine never fully understood — the specific quality of three hours and nineteen minutes when the task was total and the mind was entirely in it. No Davan. No Hold. No Zevran or Caelen or Solène or the bridge or the photograph in the entrance court. Just: the work. The bone, the infection, the specific architecture of
