Carter," the nurse said, "would you like to pick your forceps?" She was standing in the door of the instrument room. She had seen him get off the elevator and walk down the hall toward her, opening the starched and ironed white cap and turning the bottom edge up about a half-inch so that it would fit flat on his head and not have a tufted ridge along the top nor come down to his ears. "Sure," he said, putting on the cap and smoothing it and following her into the room. How are you?" "I'm fine, sir." He looked at the dozen forceps lying in the slots of the wooden rack on the counter, each about sixteen inches long, slender and delicate, designed to be passed down through the bronchoscope and with the scissor-like handles at one end activating the small jaws at the other. If it should actually be a piece of soft hamburger meat, he was thinking, he would need the biopsy forceps with the flat spoons on the end, but if it turned out to be a sliver of bone or a piece of gristle he might get it more easily with a pair with tonglike jaws.
