Sunday, April 24, 2022

poem

 Op Note XIX

That’s not the liver, I told the resident, and that’s not the spleen.  The resident squinted his eyes over his mask at me.  What do you mean, he queried.  It must be so.  Both anatomically and in the morphologic sense it appears we have happened upon structures highly suggestive of.  He was a high performer.  He knew his books cold.  I just laughed.  You’ve never been here before, have you?  Not like this. This is your first time. In here we are gods.  Here, things have no names.  There was a tight flurry of action and change on the screen.  Something amorphous and gray was free.  Then it was in a clear plastic bag leaving this place of order and form.  The bag dangled from a string that hung from my pinched thumb and forefinger.  It swayed back and forth like a hypnotist's charm.  The resident opened his eyes.  



4/24/22

1 comment:

Oldfoolrn said...

The biggest shock of my life was when I discovered real surgery looked nothing like Frank Netter's illustrations.