Infectious diseases physician Stephen Vaughan stands at a sink in Calgary’s South Health Campus wearing a surgeon’s scrubs, cap, and mask, washing up with orthopaedic surgeon Stephen Hunt. Inside the operating room, the two men receive sterile towels and gowns and take their place next to seventy-four-year-old Boyd English, already asleep on the table. English has a hip infection and he needs to have the joint washed out. Again.
Hunt draws a scalpel across English’s right hip. None of the three men can remember how many surgeries English has had, but according to Hunt, when it comes to English’s hip, “everything [has been] taken out and put back in. His X-rays give an orthopaedic surgeon shivers.” To the steady beep of the heart monitor, Hunt dissects down to the cold steel glint of the prosthetic English has as a result of an accident on an oil rig in the Yukon in 1973 that sent him crashing to the ground, breaking part of his femur. Infection set in something like forty years ago. Recently, fluid has frequently been draining to the outside of his body, soaking through dressings and even his pants until another surgery or round of antibiotics knocks back the infection. Today the two Steves are going in, for what they hope will be the last time, to clean out the joint and take samples of English’s infected tissues. (Hunt is my husband, and we both know Vaughan from medical school.) The samples will be sent to the lab to identify which bacteria are growing and which antibiotics might work.
