It takes everything she has not to stand up and scream.

But Debra Dreise knows that she can’t.

She understands that here at the venerable Court of Appeal she must maintain her composure even as she and her fellow 20 victims are accused of having hallucinated the sexual assaults they suffered at the hands of former North York General anesthesiologist George Doodnaught.

As if they were just hysterical women.

They went into that hospital to be healed. Instead, they left broken and traumatized. Doodnaught preyed on them at their most vulnerable — lying drugged and helpless and unable to fight back or even express their desperate objections.

Now he wants the appeal court to overturn his 21 convictions for sexual assault.

Defence lawyer Brian Greenspan is insisting such brazen assaults were so physically impossible that they’d require “Houdini-like” manoeuvres and could not have gone unnoticed in the busy OR.

Instead, he argued, the women had honestly held but “hallucinatory, delusional” misperceptions brought on by the confluence of drugs used by Doodnaught to put them in conscious sedation.

Dreise was Doodnaught’s last victim. While undergoing a hysterectomy, she recalls her anesthesiologist forcing his penis into her mouth and assuring her that he was discreet. She went to Toronto Police and her complaint finally led to his arrest in 2010, opening the floodgates to other patients who had previously complained to relatives — and in some cases to the hospital itself — of similar assaults.

Ranging in age from 25 to 75, some of the women had been fondled and kissed, others had been forced to perform fellatio or manual masturbation during operations that spanned 2006 to 2010.

Following a six-month trial before Justice David McCombs, Doodnaught was convicted in November 2013 and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

More than three years later, his appeal began this week.

“It’s hard,” says Dreise, who went to court three years ago to lift the publication ban on her name. “It’s really hard to go through it again and listen to the defence attorney pick through everything of your testimony — my testimony — and basically say that I’m a liar and it didn’t happen.”

Despite the difficulty, Dreise knew she had to come and show the judges that Doodnaught’s many victims are real people who suffer to this day.

“We’re still here. We’re still involved. We’re still waiting for some kind of closure.”

Seven years later and she still has panic attacks and seemingly inexplicable crying jags.

“My twins don’t have a mother who’s 100% and it’s hard to go through day by day. Some days I don’t even want to get up and shower and brush my teeth, but I make it through.”

Meanwhile, Doodnaught bides his easy time in a minimum security prison in dormitory conditions.

Dreise has been told the father of five is eligible for day parole this fall.

“He should be behind bars. The judge said 10 years. Keep him in there for 10 years,” she says. “Why does he get to forget and to enjoy life? Why is it OK for him? We’re going to live with this for the rest of our lives.”

In the appeal, Greenspan has been methodically reviewing each of the 21 counts while accusing the trial judge of being “dead wrong” in his analysis of much of the evidence. McCombs was using “conclusion driven reasoning,” he said, and disregarding anything that didn’t mesh with his belief that Doodnaught was guilty.

“I’m saying none of the fellatios happened. That’s eight counts,” Greenspan said. “The mechanics of it just doesn’t work. We say it’s impossible.”

And if those assaults didn’t happen, he argued, then that supports their alternate theory: that all these women’s memories were the product of sexual fantasies brought on by the drugs and Doodnaught’s distinctive touchy-feely style.

But it did happen, Dreise insists. This was no sexual fantasy, this was a nightmare that was all too real.

“It’s hard to listen to,” she says. “It’s hard not to shed a tear and it’s hard to hold it together. And it’s exceptionally hard not to stand up and say, ‘No, you’re wrong’ ”

The appeal continues Wednesday.

mmandel@postmedia.com