Mallory Blamed Me For Nine Canceled Operations In The Break Room

Before I spoke to Mallory Quill, I lined up the handles of three clean forceps. All three faced the door.

That was my habit. I gave my hands a small job so my mouth could do its own.

At fifty-one, I was a Korean American woman with a square face, brown eyes, and black hair streaked with gray that I pinned flat beneath my scrub cap.

My badge read Eunhee Park, Sterile Processing Supervisor. At Flint Creek Surgical Center in Wichita, Kansas, I led four people who washed, checked, packed, and sterilized the tools used in surgery.

That Monday, May 6, I had stopped a load from leaving our workroom.

Steam unit Two had ended its cycle early. The selected cycle required twenty-four minutes of exposure. Its paper strip showed six.

I marked every tray HOLD. Then I placed the whole cart in our locked quarantine area.

Unit One had been retired on March 1. Its steam line was capped. Two was all we had.

Mallory arrived holding a paper cup and my incident report.

Mallory was a white woman of forty-five with a sharp blond bob, pale blue eyes, and smooth pink nails that clicked against her silver watch.

"Nine operations," she said. "Nine families. Do you know what you've done?"

"I kept an incomplete load out of surgery."

"Your attitude is the problem."

"The cycle ended early."

"And you couldn't run it again?"

"It failed twice yesterday. I asked for service."

"You ask for everything in writing."

Behind her, a floor nurse waited with an empty case cart. The cart wheels still held rain from the covered walk. Outside, wind pushed water sideways across the parking lot.

"Please tell the charge nurse nothing from that load was released," I said.

Mallory turned away before I finished.

By eight, surgeons and staff had been called to the break room. Someone had set out grocery-store muffins. No one touched them.

Mallory stood beside the microwave.

"This morning's shutdown came from a processing error," she said. "Eunhee failed to manage our equipment and then refused a reasonable solution."

Dr. Caleb Voss looked at me. "You cleared the load?"

"No. I quarantined it."

"Then why are we calling this a processing error?"

"Caleb, please," Mallory said. "I need cooperation, not another attitude problem."

She passed me a form.

Effective immediately, I was a processing technician. My pay would drop from $31 to $23 an hour. I would report to a temporary lead she had not yet hired.

The reason box said FAILURE TO FOLLOW DIRECTION.

At forty hours, that was $320 gone each week.

"Sign at the bottom," she said.

"For receipt?"

"Does everything have to be a fight?"

I wrote Received, not agreed, then signed and dated it.

Her mouth tightened.

"Those canceled cases were worth $47,800 on our schedule," she told the room. "Remember that when overtime gets cut."

I folded my copy once. My hands shook enough that the edges missed.

After twenty-two years in processing, I had learned that anger could make a person skip a line. So I went back to my bench and read each line twice.

Load 2187. Unit Two. Abort code C-17. Door remained closed until pressure reached zero.

The small printer had left a faint blank stripe down one side of the paper. It had done that since February.

I knew that stripe as well as my own thumbprint.

The electronic summary on the office computer said CYCLE COMPLETE.

I opened it again. Same words. Same load number.

The machine's strip said ABORT.

Tessa Lane, my youngest tech, leaned near the screen.

"Which one do we save?"

"Both."

Mallory spoke from the doorway. "The final report is the electronic one. Don't confuse her."

I closed the screen without deleting anything.

Under our written records plan, I was also the custodian of the equipment maintenance binder. It stayed in a locked cabinet beside the clean workroom. Its contents belonged to the center. Keeping them safe was my job.

Mallory called it my scrapbook.

Inside were the original cycle strips, service notes, and repair requests. Three requests carried her signature beneath the word Deferred. The oldest was dated March 12. Each named the same controller fault. The repair quote was $2,860.

I had never argued that paper was better than a computer. I kept paper because the machine made it before anyone could write a summary.

At lunch, I opened the binder to May 6. I added the failed strip and the signed quarantine sheet.

Then I found an email from Mallory, sent to processing and copied to no one else.

Clear out the old paper cycle slips before Thursday's owner visit. Electronic reports are sufficient. Put the binder beside the shred bin by five.