Oxygen

by Carol Cassella

Simon & Schuster, 2008

Seattle anesthesiologist Carol Cassella has written a debut novel that is very nearly derailed by her own Author Bio in the back of the book. Not the part about studying at Duke and freelancing for years on subjects connected with public health advocacy, but the astonishing fact that she’s had two sets of twins, fifteen months apart in age. What fictional tale could rival the memoir this woman could write? Who could read that detail and not at once become more interested in it than in the events of Oxygen, her novel?

Fortunately, Oxygen is a fantastic book and manages in very few pages (very nearly from page 1) to reclaim your attention. Since it’s a debut novel, you won’t be surprised to learn that its main character is a female Seattle anesthesiologist, but Dr. Marie Heaton is a remarkable fictional creation in her own right, and by the time an operating room mishap results in a patient’s death and brings all kinds of darkness into her life, the reader is thoroughly hooked. Every aspect of the American medical bureaucracy is here flawlessly rendered, but it’s Cassella’s grasp of character and great ear for dialogue (spoken and otherwise) that propels the book, as in this tense encounter Dr. Heaton has with a hospital administrator who talks to her about possible negligence:

Negligence. It’s the first time anyone’s spoken that word to me out loud. I’ve said it to myself. I even looked it up: “failure to exercise the care that a reasonably prudent person would exercise in like circumstances.”

The book opens with an evocative description of the godlike power an anesthesiologist exercises over the patients on her table, and since the novel is narrated in the first person, the reader feels a bit of the relish Dr. Heaton experiences in her job – which makes the subsequent nightmare that ensnares her life all the more poignant and irresistible. This book is no medical thriller, although writing of this caliber is thrilling; rather, it’s a medical tragedy, one with many victims. Only the readers – and I hope Cassella has many – have a purely pleasant experience of it all.