Flesh
The surgeon’s hands resemble those of Mary’s in Michelangelo’s Pietà — they are slender and have long, tapered fingers. I expect a weak handshake and am surprised when it is firm, dry and brusk: the mark of a professional. His face is assured and kind, but somewhat disappointing. In photographs I have seen, he sported a mustache and resembled a thin Emiliano Zapata. Associating the two gave me an outlaw charge. Still, I know his politics are left of center, and I smile when he mentions Che Guevara, who also studied medicine. We make small talk and joke a bit, and then he gets down to business, explaining the procedure carefully and asking whether I have questions. I have none.
Minutes later, pumped full of lidocaine, comfortably numb, I cannot feel his scalpel at work, but my body realizes something is horribly wrong; my heart races, my face flushes, and I fight an adrenaline urge to leap up and flee the room. I chatter instead, making inane conversation to pass time. I hear what I think is scalp being lacerated, but the surgeon assures me it is only the sound of the blade moving in the scalpel handle. To my ears it is more like a band of razor-toothed termites nibbling away at my flesh and my mortality, and it dawns on me that — apart from women who take me inside them and perhaps take away something of me with them — I will never have a more intimate relationship with another human. This man chips away at my mortality, subjects my skin to his will, understands the machinery underneath my frail protective sheath better than I do myself. It is unnerving. It also makes me vulnerable, and in a flash I understand how a patient might confuse a physician’s love of his work and a gentle bedside manner with personal affection. Just as a poet or musician’s work is sometimes confused with the artist, so a work of surgical art might be confused with its practitioner.
Then it is done, the wound closed with sutures, and the offending part of me whisked away under a sterile drape. I sit up and talk with the doctor briefly, but his mind is already elsewhere, and any intimacy is forgotten. It is not me he loves, but his work.
Later, discussing the procedure over the telephone, I am reminded of the personal relationships that led me to the table, and of the tragedy that facilitated it. “Every story has two sides,” I am told. I want to ask, “When did I ever live in a binary, black-and-white world? When did I lack a subtly nuanced grayscale?”
No human is a perfect saint, nor a perfect sinner. God knows I am plagued by hosts of angels and demons. We land at last on a continuum, buoyed or submerged by our own shuck and jive. We’re all in need of mercy and love, every mother’s son and daughter of us. I buy everyone’s story — and no one’s — exactly as they tell it. We tell the truth as we understand it, and every one of us is in a sense a liar, because truth, like time, is relative: only God understands absolute truth. I am no one’s judge.
What matters to me — and to all those like me who come to a place where they require a surgeon’s skill — is someone stepped up to the plate. To me in that moment, he was angelic. If I prefer to find the angels in everyone I meet, that’s my business. I don’t demand it of others. It just works for me.
(And if I fail to find angels in most Republicans … well, that’s my business too.)
(I’m kidding.)
(Honestly.)
Flesh has 2 responses
Rod says:
25 April 2008 at 2:14 pm
Hey buddy. I hope you are doing well. Call me if you need me. Just realize one thing- I love my work AND my patients as well. That is what underlies everything I do (or try to do).
Steve says:
26 April 2008 at 3:44 pm
Gray will never look the same.
Caregivers don’t get in the business without loving people. It’s the caring for people that can intermittently get you in a mess. I’ve found myself in many messes throughout my life.
