“Well, Paulie’s got a lot of people. And this is a big fight. He’s won all 21 of his pro fights, and it’s his first time at the Garden. Cotto is the current WBO Junior Welterweight Champion, so he’s also fighting for his first world title,” Dr. Williams said.
The only thing I knew about Cotto was that he was from Puerto Rico and always fought in New York the Saturday before his countrymen’s parade. When I met him backstage to check his pulse and pressure, he was very serious. I guessed it was because he spoke no English and therefore had no idea what I was saying. Luckily, when the interpreter explained who I was and why I was there, he didn’t seem bothered by my being la doctora.
“Are you ready for your cameo?” Dr. Williams asked, gesturing around the room.
“What do you mean? Cameo for what?” I asked.
“Tonight’s fight is televised. Didn’t you say you used to watch HBO Boxing after Dark? Well, tonight you may very likely be on HBO.”
I looked around at what my brain had failed to perceive. Large cameras and HBO signs strung the room. HBO Boxing after Dark: it brought me back to my apartment in residency, crammed full of unrequited creativity and emptiness. I got flashes of splattered canvases and filthy scrubs. Moldy cheese sandwiches and pizza boxes. It seemed inconceivable that these two realities could exist in the same lifetime.
“The cameras are for the fighters,” I said, pragmatically. “I have no interest in being on television.” I always laughed at the other doctors when they got excited by it. Even if they were on-screen, front and center, no one ever noticed them. The audience only cared about the fighters.
“You never know,” he said, like he had a secret he wasn’t going to share.
* * *
I was standing behind the commission tables across from Dr. Williams when Paulie entered the ring. He was clad in blue satin and white spandex. His black hair, newly bleached at the tips and spiked with gel, was swept off his face by a blue headband. He wore knee-length tights with fringed panels around the waist, embroidered with blue stripes and yellow stars.
I closed my eyes and let my other senses take over. The energy was overwhelming now that the arena was full. I heard fragments of conversations rising over the hum of crowd noise and smelled hoppy notes of beer and sweat. When Cotto was announced, the cheering reached a deafening volume. I felt it vibrate in my chest and abdomen.
After the introductions, the bells clanged, and the fight commenced. The fighters went at each other, easy at first, but hyped with adrenaline. They slowed by the end of the first round, their hormones rebalancing.
I looked behind where I was standing at celebrities I recognized and ones I didn’t, interspersed with people who could afford such decadent seats. Unlike the other fans, the A-listers held stoic expressions, presumably so the cameras didn’t catch them with an authentic or otherwise ugly emotion. I wondered what made them want to go to the fights in the first place—whether it was genuine interest or just more television exposure.
It was an even match for the first five rounds, each fighter landing blows and combinations that pleased both the crowd and corner men. Between the bells, cut men cooled swollen brows with enswells, while scantily clad ring girls provoked hoots and whistles.
It was the sixth round that changed everything for me. Cotto clocked Malignaggi in the face with a left hook, catching his right cheekbone as he turned his head. It was not so different from his other hooks, but this particular one had just enough force to break the weakest of structures that held up that side of Malignaggi’s face: the orbital floor. It was a maxillary blowout fracture. I had seen so many in residency I could diagnose them from twenty feet away. The fracture made his pretty-boy face swell as his sinus filled with blood. If he kept fighting, bits of muscle, fat, nerves and eyeball could fall into the sinus below and cause permanent damage. I needed to tell Dr. Williams.
I looked at him across the ring, but I hesitated. Since I was working the back, I wasn’t supposed to interfere with what was going on in the ring. My responsibility was before and after the fights, not during. I could watch the fight, but the corner doctors were in charge. I made my way over to Dr. Roy.
“Paulie has a maxillary sinus fracture,” I said, heart pounding so hard I felt my chest move with every beat.
Dr. Roy looked at me like I was speaking in tongues. “What are you talking about?”
“His orbital floor—it’s cracked or blown out.” I stumbled over my words, unable to make my mouth move fast enough to keep up with my brain. He didn’t seem to be getting it. “He could lose his eye,” I added. “You have to tell Dr. Williams. He can’t keep fighting!”
“Okay, relax. I’ll let Dr. Williams know. We’ll see what he thinks.” He maneuvered his way over to the chief medical officer, and I waited in fear as the two of them spoke into each other’s ears, gesturing in the air with cupped hands.
When Dr. Roy returned, I assumed he would have good news and that Dr. Williams would be pleased that I had caught a potentially devastating injury. I was wrong.
“He says Paulie’s fine. It’s just his mandible.”
“What? The mandible is his jaw. He’s swollen in his cheek, not his jaw. Are you kidding?” Were they blind or just ignoring me?
“I’ll check him again after the next round,” Dr. Roy said. Between the two of them, he and Dr. Williams had decades of experience working the fights. Was it possible they had never seen this kind of injury? Or maybe they just didn’t believe me. Who would listen to a woman dressed like an expensive hooker?
The bell clanged. The fighters were back in the ring.
For the next four rounds, I watched in horror as Cotto pummeled Malignaggi in the face. Blood dripped into Malignaggi’s eye like a leaky faucet from an already lacerated left brow. The right side of his face swelled so snugly that his lids sealed together, blocking the vision in that eye as well. He fought back hard until the tenth round, when he became noticeably fatigued. Cotto, still with some reserve left, punched even harder, overpowering him. After twelve rounds, Cotto was declared the winner by unanimous decision. The mostly Puerto Rican crowd went wild.
As soon as the fight was over, before the boxers even left the ring, Dr. Roy rushed over to me. “I need you to look at Paulie. Come with me to his dressing room. Hurry.” He seemed suddenly nervous, like he’d finally realized what I had been trying to tell him. Then, it occurred to me—maybe they had believed me after all, but there’d been too much at stake to stop the fight. Now they needed me to clean up the mess.
I followed Dr. Roy in the wake of Paulie’s gathering entourage, with cameramen and reporters trailing behind us. We got to the dressing room and shut the door, leaving the rest of the world blind to the real aftermath of the fight.
Somehow the dressing room was already full of wailing grown men. Some yelled phrases of sorrow in Italian, prolonging open vowels to match the extent of their duress. Others spoke with their hands, squeezing fingers to thumbs and raising them up to the heavens, imploring God for forsaking their fighter. As if God cared either way. Paulie was pacing the room, when Dr. Roy took him and me by the elbows and directed us into the bathroom so we could have some privacy. He shut the door, leaving me to assess the damage.
“Oh my God, oh my God... What happened to my face?” Paulie screamed into the mirror, patting doughy cheeks with the fingers of his still-wrapped hands, horrified at the cherubic chipmunk that stared back at him. His skin was mottled like hamburger meat, enveloping his bony understructures like a balloon.
“Let me take a look,” I said, grabbing him by the shoulders and turning him to face me. Tears dripped from his eye slits as I placed my thumb and forefinger on his nasal bones and pressed to see if they were broken. They held solidly in place. His nose was dripping blood on my gloves and suit, but it was not coming from a nasal fracture. I pressed on his cheekbones and felt a step-off fracture on the front of his ri
ght cheekbone. Just as expected, he had a blowout fracture, but the real damage was much deeper than anything I could assess in a dressing room. His jawbone was the only part of him that was fine.
“I’m going to cover each eye, and I want you to follow my finger. Let me know if you have double vision.” I moved my finger to the right and left to see if the muscles that moved his eyes were trapped by fractured bone.
“I can barely see, man. I can’t look to the right. Everything is blurry, I see two of everything.” He closed his eyes and bent forward, overwhelmed.
As I was about to explain my findings to Dr. Roy, another man burst into the bathroom.
“What’s going on here? I need to know. I handle all of Paulie’s medical care. I’m his personal physician.” He came at me with such authority, my first instinct was to report my medical findings like an intern on rounds. I didn’t understand what personal physician meant, but I assumed it meant he managed all of Paulie’s care.
I went at him with the medspeak. “He has a maxillary blowout fracture on the right, with entrapment of his extraocular muscles, and he has epistaxis, but his nasal dorsum is intact, which means the lamina papyracea is probably broken, too.”
Instead of a response, he just stared at me. The same stare Dr. Roy had given me earlier. My inner Dom bristled. “What kind of doctor are you exactly?” I asked.
“Uh, I’m his hand doctor,” he said, turning pink.
“You’re his hand doctor? You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you? I’m getting him to the hospital.” I turned to Dr. Roy with more orders. “He needs a CT scan right away. His facial bones will need to be plated sooner rather than later so his orbit doesn’t sink into the sinus.” Then to Paulie: “Get your things. We’re going to the ER.”
The moment he walked out of the bathroom, Paulie collapsed onto the floor. The emergency medical technicians ran to him.
“Man down, man down!”
I knelt to the floor, whispering, “Paulie, I know you’re fine. Do you need to be on the ground?”
He shook his head and held his face with his hands. He began to cry. “My face, it’s ruined. It’s ruined. And I lost...”
“You need to pull yourself together,” I said. “If you can get up right now, I suggest you do. I know you’re upset, but if you can’t get it together, they’re going to carry you out on a stretcher. How would you feel about that?” He grabbed my arm as I stood up.
“You can’t move the patient!” the EMTs yelled. “Lay him back down. Sir, lie down!”
I blocked them from coming near Paulie. “I am the doctor here, and I’m taking responsibility.”
“You can’t just get him up. We have to follow protocol,” one of them said, more used to barking out orders than taking them.
“We have to take him to the ER. He can walk to the ambulance. I’ll go with him so he doesn’t collapse.”
The EMTs, along with everyone else in the room, quieted, watching me lead Paulie down the hall to the ambulance. On our way, we ran into the Chairman.
“Linda, what’s happening? Is he okay?” He was anxious in a way I’d never seen.
“I’m taking him to St. Vincent’s. He’ll go in the ambulance, and I’ll take a cab and meet him there.”
“I’ll ride with you,” he said.
When we arrived in the ER, Paulie had already been taken to a room. Even though I didn’t have privileges at the hospital, my Dom took charge again, demanding to speak with the ER doctor. I gave him the diagnosis and told him the type of scan to order. I asked to see Paulie, and he led me to the trauma bay.
“I just wanted to make sure you’re okay before I leave,” I said when I saw him. “I told the ER team what to do. They will take care of you.” He was still sobbing, head buried in the chest of a woman I assumed was his girlfriend. Stained with sweat and diluted blood, the once-white spandex tights were sunrise pink. His spiked hair had melted into a sticky mess.
The Chairman followed me out as I was leaving, jogging to catch up to me. “Linda, good work in there. We couldn’t have taken care of him without you tonight. He was hurt real bad.”
I had so much I wanted to say but felt my actions had spoken clearly enough. I left the hospital, stepping into the warm summer night.
* * *
At home, alone in my apartment, I looked into the mirror. The person who stared back was someone I no longer recognized. Blood was smeared on my neck and face, dried into dark maroon segments across my clavicles. Eyeliner was smudged down the side of one eye, and the only remnant of lipstick was an irregular red line, traced around the edge of my upper lip.
You can’t get rid of me, the Dom said. You can’t pick and choose when to call on me. Because I am you. I’m the part that wants what you deserve: a part you never knew existed.
I listened, like I did to the other voices in my head. There was the voice that told me I was broken and not good enough. The voice that kept me glued to the ground in fear. The voice that told me I was fat and ugly. There were so many voices, it was hard to hear my own. But the Dom was louder than all of them.
13
The rumors were circulating.
The chair at the hospital had been replaced by a younger, more driven counterpart, and he was reorganizing the department. At his introductory dinner, I was seated between him and Dr. Marsh, inadvertently playing matchmaker by bringing up common interests. It turned out they had a mutual love of jazz and had since seen a concert or two together.
“During Grand Rounds, I overheard one of the doctors saying he’s trying to woo Dr. Marsh back to the hospital,” Amber the drug rep had whispered one day.
I didn’t believe it. Dr. Marsh would never want to work for an institution. Not after running his own practice. He denied it point-blank when I asked him. “I’m just showing my support for the department,” he had said. “And it helps the practice. He offered us extra surgical-block time.”
We were so busy with new patients, we could certainly use it.
* * *
“It’s the same stuff. Green snot, you know. I almost brought you some,” Mr. Smith said, hanging his suit jacket above his tan leather briefcase by the door. His mucous offering wasn’t unusual. Patients often brought in their disgusting excretions, thinking they would help in my diagnosis. But they only made me want to throw up.
“Headache, congestion and cough, too?” I asked. Mr. Smith, along with his wife and children, had been my patients for years. During winter months, at least one of them visited the office every few weeks, passing around illnesses in a game of infectious round robin.
“Yeah, yeah, all those things,” he said offhandedly, which was strange. Typically, he enjoyed elaborating on his symptoms. He didn’t just have a headache, he had pinpoint pressure just above his left eye. His nose was blocked more on one side than the other, alternating back and forth every few hours and making it hard to sleep. Even though his diagnosis was always the same, he seemed to savor the opportunity to talk about himself. I guessed he rarely had such an attentive listener.
“Is everything else okay?” I asked, regretting the question as soon as it left my lips. Although we had a good doctor–patient relationship, I had learned the hard way that it was best to avoid personal topics with male patients.
He seemed nervous, fidgeting in the seat, shifting his weight from one hip to the other as he contemplated my question.
“I saw you on TV,” he said.
“What are you talking about? I wasn’t on TV.” I thought he had mistaken me for one of those doctors who did spots on the evening news. My practice colleague, Dr. Evans, had done that once. One spring, he was interviewed about rising pollen counts. While B-roll of him walking through the office in his white coat played in the background, the newscaster commented: “City planners choose male trees over females because they don’t produce fruit or seeds, which a
re messy and harder to maintain. But male trees have another job: producing that pesky pollen. With fewer female trees to capture the pollen and filter the air, we are left with more allergens—allergens that get trapped in your nose, making you sneeze and cough.” I thought it was hilarious that they were explaining how trees have sex through the air, making our respiratory systems the inadvertent recipients of tree semen.
“It was definitely you. I was watching the fights,” he said.
His words filled me with dread. I still hadn’t broken the news about my secret life to my bosses, and I wanted to keep it that way. As far as I knew, I had successfully avoided the cameras when they interviewed boxers. I couldn’t figure out how I had still ended up on television.
Mr. Smith answered for me. “I saw you on the MSG Network. Does that ring a bell?” he asked, leaning forward in the chair, gaining confidence.
“What’s the MSG Network?” I asked, trying to wrap my head around an entire network dedicated to the toxic food additive that sabotaged my stomach every time I ate Chinese food.
“The Madison Square Garden Network. At the fights. The last fight I saw, the camera was facing you the whole time. At first, I didn’t believe it, but it was definitely you. You’re a fight doctor,” he said, almost accusatorily.
“I didn’t realize they televised... I thought it was archival... But I’m never...” I could barely string together a sentence. I wondered how many other people had seen me.
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