Thou art blind-ears, mind, eyes alike. Handsome body, kind of heart. The women are dressed in linen smocks, with both forearm and upper arm bare.
Sunday, July 24, 2011
INTERNALS OF AN ANGEL
I'm ashamed of our human capacity to hurt and maim one another, to desecrate the body. Yet it allows me to see the cabalistic harmony of heart peeking out behind lung, of liver and spleen consulting each other under the dome of the diaphragm-these things leave me speechless. My fingers "run the bowel" looking for holes that a blade or bullet might have created, coil after glistening coil, twenty-three feet of it compacted into such a small space. The guy that has slithered past my fingers like this in the African night would be now reach the Cape of Good Hope, and I have yet to see the serpents head. But I do see the ordinary miracles under skin and rib and muscle, visions concealed from their owner. Is there a greater privilege on earth?
ADDIS ABABA
Knives are flashing and rocks and bullets are flying, and when I feel as if I am standing in an abattoir and not in Operating Theater 3, my skin flecked with the grist and blood of strangers. I remember. But you don't always know the answers before you operate. One operates in the now. Later, the retrospectoscope, that handy tool of the wags and pundits, the conveners of the farce we call M&M-morbidity and mortality conference-will pronounce your decision right or wrong. Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel.
Saturday, July 23, 2011
REMEMBERING HIS WORDS ON FULL-MOON NIGHTS IN ADDIS ABABA
I followed. "Dr. Stone," I said, using his title thought I longed to cry out, Father! "An operation is his only chance," I said. In my heart I knew the chances was infinitesimally small, and the first whiff of anesthesia might end it all. My father put his hand on my shoulder. He spoke to me gently, as if to a junior colleague rather than his son. "Marion, remember the Eleventh Commandment," he said. "Thou shall not operate on the day of a patient's death."
MAN ON FIRE
When a certain someone needs bailed out they bill Germany. Lol don't think i don't gratefully appreciate all that you have done Mumford and Sons, but i think you've earned a break! So happily pass that torch there's a new flame! i promise to burn bright and make you proud!
EXPERIENCED TOUCH
Thirty years later, I am not known for speed, or daring, or technical genius. Call me steady, call me plodding; say I adopt the style and technique that suits the patient and the particular situation and I'll consider that high praise. I take heart from my fellow physicians who come to me when they themselves must suffer the knife. They know that Marion Stone will be as involved after the surgery as before and during. They know I have no use for surgical aphorisms such as "When in doubt, but it out" or "Why wait when you can operate" other than for how reliably they reveal the shallowest intellects in our field. My father, for whose skills as a surgeon I have the deepest respect, says, "The operation with the best outcome is the one you decide not to do." Knowing when not to operate, knowing when I am in over my head, knowing when to call for the assistance of a surgeon of my father's caliber-that kind of talent, that kind of "brilliance," goes unheralded!
AN OPERA SINGER TOLD ME
"What is the hardest thing you can possibly do?" she said when I went to her for advice on the darkest day of the first half of my life. I squirmed. How easily Matron probed the gap between ambition and expediency. "Why must I do what is hardest?" "Because, Marion, you are an instrument of God. Don't leave the instrument sitting in its case, my son. Play! Leave no part of your instrument unexplored. Why settle for 'Three Blind Mice' when you can play the 'Gloria'?" How unfair of Matron to evoke that soaring chorale which always made me feel that I stood with every mortal creature looking up to the heavens in dumb wonder. She understood my unformed character.
PQ
We come unbidden into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot. I grew up and I found my purpose and it was to become a physician. My intent wasn't to save the world as much as to heal myself. Few doctors will admit this, certainly not young ones, but subconsciously, in entering the profession, we must believe that ministering to others will heal our woundedness. And it can. But it can also deepen the wound.
GROWING ^
46 and 4 years have passed since my birth, and miraculously I have the opportunity to return to that room. I find I am too large for that chair now, and the cardigan sits atop my shoulders like the lace amice of a priest. But chair, cardigan, and calendar print of transverberation are still there. I, Marion Stone, have changed, but little else has. Being in that unaltered room propels a thumbing back through time and memory. The unfading print of Bernini's statue of St. Teresa now framed and under glass to preserve what my mother tacked up seems to demand this. I am forced to render some order to the events of my life, to say it began here, and then because of this, that happened, and this is how the end connects to the beginning, and so here I am.
WHEN ARE YOU COMING?
"When are you coming, Mama?" I would ask, my small voice echoing off the cold tile. When are you coming? I would whisper my answer: "By God!" That was all I had to go by: Dr. Ghosh's declaration the time I'd first wandered in there and he'd come looking for me and had stared at the picture of St. Teresa over my shoulders; he lifted me in his strong arms and said in that voice of his that was every bit a match for the autoclave: "She is CUM-MING, by God!"
Friday, July 22, 2011
SLOWLY DYING
They are sick with all diseases! Overmuch am I afflicted with a wound wherewith a mortal man smote me. The sweetly smiling L. laughing a good un back he comes, enraged, fierce-eyed!
FING BULL SHIT
What am i lying about? If there is no queen waiting for me and no wedding and all this other bull shit then WTF are we doing? How about you stop using me to get what you need for a change and you give me what i want!
RIGHT ABOVE IT
Fake friends write the wrong answers and the mirror for me. That's why i pick and choose, i don't get shit confused *. i like my chicks in twos!
PQ
i don't like the smell of this food i don't have to pick one and that doesn't mean i'm not serious, far from it, i meant it from the moment i said it i love you both equally and i'm taking both of you home with me and that's the end of it! If you don't like it or agree with it i never asked for your opinion now did i so get over it!
CONTENDING
"to hit a six"; but a moment's thought will show that "a six" is not a genuine object; what the batsman really hits is the ball, but he hits it in a six-sort-of-way, "a six" is an adverbial limitation of "to hit" Cp in Greek to win an Olympic victory; what the man defeats is his fellow-competitors.
LAEDUNT
Laedunt has two objects, me external, quid internal. Cp. English, "I strike him a blow". Cp. our "play cricket", "fight ten rounds", dance a foxtrot", (dialect) "he sang a treat".
PQ
i should be seeing more out of both of you (Diana/Hera) i want, i need to feel you! Here i am stripping naked i'd do anything for you so grow up and lose the other husband Diana and your boyfriend Hera i'll kill em, guys maybe you want to back off if you know what's good for you! You all should be fighting over me even though there is more than enough for all of you! i don't know why we keep torturing ourselves we're making this harder than it needs to be i think we all deserve more from each other so lets me already!
Thursday, July 21, 2011
IN MY WINDOWLESS ROOM
As a little boy of four, I took myself away to this windowless room to study the image. Courage alone could not get me past that heavy door, but my sense that she was there, my obsession to know the nun who was my mother, gave me strength. I sat next to the autoclave which rumbled and hissed like a waking dragon, as if the hammering of my heart had roused the beast. Gradually, as I say at my mother's desk, a peace would come over me, a sense of communion with her. I learned later that no one had dared remove her cardigan from where it sat draped on the chair. It was a sacred object. But for a four-year-old, everything is sacred and ordinary. I pulled that Cuticura-scented garment around my shoulders. I rimmed the dried-out inkpot with my nail, tracing a path her fingers had taken. Gazing up at the calendar print just as she must have while sitting there in that windowless room, I was transfixed by that image. Years later, I learned that St. Teresa's recurrent vision of the angel was called transverberation, which the dictionary said was the soul "inflamed" by the love of God, and the heart "pierced" by divine love; the metaphors of her faith were also the metaphors of medicine. At four years of age, I didn't need words like "transverberation" to feel reverence for that image.
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