For once then, something...

My third year of medical school, and I have finally begun my training. I am slowly learning to be a surgeon. I will open you up and search through the detritus of sickness, extirpate what is necessary, and leave in my wake a health of my own creation. There is power in that; a power that I have already glimpsed. Reaching out and calmly saying, "knife." Deliberately moving the scalpel across the skin and watching the slow rise of blood a few inches behind the passing blade. There is nothing so intimate as opening up a person and looking at her from the literal inside. But this act is at once intimate and completely impersonal. Even as I watch the heart beat in an open chest, that is all I see. The lungs move in and out under the control of a machine: a rhythm too steady to be human. Sterile blue drapes cover the hands and the face, and we are operating only on a heart. The surgeons move quickly but carefully through the operation, as I watch, learn, and occasionally help by removing blood from the field or cutting the tiny sutures they use to hold the new arteries onto the old ones. Eventually our work is done, and we close the chest with wires pulled tight around the sternum. We pull away the drapes, again revealing the patient, the man whose life we may have just saved. And all that remains is a closed wound running down the center of his chest. He is again revealed. A man more than middle-aged, but less than elderly. A man with a job, and friends, and a family. A man who came to the operating room this morning with a very real fear of dying. A fear so strong he was willing to let us cut him open, stop his heart, repair it, and start it up again. A man who wanted us to take that fear away. That man with his fear and his family disappeared as we pushed his lungs aside to see the steadily beating muscle. To these surgeons the personal and the intimate are mutually exclusive. We must concentrate on the job or things get too complicated. The surgeon refuses to operate on friends, because it becomes too personal, and he cannot complete his job. The more we invade the body, the less we can comprehend the man. Like Daedalus, we know by instinct the perils of getting too close. In the operating room again: readying a patient for a heart transplant. I do not even know this man. I have never met him;