imagine it, a museum specimen of a fully-grown adult human being. a dusty skeleton - two hundred and six cold, white bones, an awkwardly fused skull, an untidy tower of thirty three vertebrae twelve pairs of ribs who spend their lifetime reaching to kiss their partner.
don't imagine, feel it - your skeleton is alive, the hard rim of your pelvis, embracing you, its soft marrow underneath that churns out your blood - can you feel it pump? listen to the slide of slick cartilage, as muscles and tendons swing your body around corners, track the groove where each one grips onto a steel girder
now watch it: the honeycombing of an old woman's spine, the way we wear our joints down in fits of human stubborness untl dumb unyielding bone meets dumb unyielding bone and they grind each other away. gravity cracks them in fits of jealousy. and eventually, we replace them with titanium (nothing else is quite so strong)
"Stella. You were in my dream the other night. And everyone called you Princess." -Lauren2010
I didn't take shortcuts, I was no prodigy, I was never particularly ambitious - but I was the smartest girl in my school, and then I met the smartest girl from every other school. Eighteen quickly robs you of pretence.
at least, now I'm twenty-four, and no one can tell me I'm too much a child to do what I do.
"Stella. You were in my dream the other night. And everyone called you Princess." -Lauren2010
I used male pronouns here as it felt more personal than 'they'. This is not to say that women can't be surgeons
14.
I have decided I can no longer stand by and listen when people call surgeons fat-cats, profit-hunters, God-like egos with legs -
no one who says such things has ever sliced into an abdomen separated the layers of skin, fat, fascia, muscle, peritoneum,
they have not put their hand into someone's body - have not taken someone's life in their hands.
look at the bags under your surgeon's eyes, mind for when his hand drifts to the ache of his lower back,
(he stood all night in an emergency laparotomy, changed back into his suit to meet you this morning and let you deride him over your normal blood pressure tablets and why haven't they restarted those yet does even know what he's doing look at him in his expensive suit I'd bet if you had insurance he'd listen to you)
rubs out the worries etched into his forehead.
listen for the long pause as he considers everything that he might have done wrong, the thoughts that have kept him awake the past three nights.
then tell me you think he does not deserve twice what he earns, (and at least one good night of sleep a week)
"Stella. You were in my dream the other night. And everyone called you Princess." -Lauren2010
a primrose alone in dappled sunlight bluebells bordering the walk to the woods.
branches crack underfoot, ants crawling up tree bark.
below, in the garden, the hum of bumblebees between roses, their perfume impossible, ever inviting a nose. the wide arms of the lawn welcoming you home for summer.
I spent seven years wishing to get out of there, to here, to the cracks between your fingers from harsh soap, the curling linoleum, the blue tunics
both institutions, both a type of gentle prison you grew to love and both have ghosts in the corridors.
"Stella. You were in my dream the other night. And everyone called you Princess." -Lauren2010
today in a text message my mother casually told me that she had finalised all the paperwork to donate her body to my medical school.
i have to hold my tongue on this, because i know it isn't for my sake. It is for future generations, and she watched a documentary about the lab, and she thought it was incredible and selfless and i cannot fault her on that
but still a part of me wants to scream at her that it is not as noble as all that that there are bored eighteen year olds hacking away at your skin that your brain lives in an old mayonnaise bucket, lifted out twice a week to press fingers to the spots where your personhood used to live
i want to explain that your body takes on the square shape of the freezer and that halfway through the second semester of your use someone takes a saw to your pelvis and firmly slices you in two
and i have a terrible fear that i did not learn anything from those bodies that i couldn't have learned from a textbook
but how to explain your fears to a woman so bright at the hope that she will teach future generations of doctors? for her sake i just hope they are aspiring surgeons, who will look at the lobes of her liver with glee and not just another bridge to cross to a career where such things do not matter.
i am forever thankful, yes, but i just wish it was not my mother some younger version of myself will be taking the scalpel to
"Stella. You were in my dream the other night. And everyone called you Princess." -Lauren2010
most of medical school is spent learning propaganda that the only way to be a good doctor is to be an addict to the knife, or to stents, or to scopes,
we are encouraged to spend our twenties in a blur taught to scoff at the "lifestyle" doctors, who decided, in a fit of madness, that they would rather see their children every night than the inside of an on-call room.
it takes a thorough re-education programme to learn that on-call mattresses are back-breaking, and 4am phone calls are heartbreaking and there is nothing wrong with wanting to be out of work at five o'clock.
"Stella. You were in my dream the other night. And everyone called you Princess." -Lauren2010
Stella, the first time I read 10, I didn't understand and skimmed right past it. My second read, though, I loved not only the personal detail you brought to it (pink highlighter, that feeling of your fingers holding the pen), but the scope that pulls on that detail (the code that took so long to make).
you can message me with anything: questions, review requests, rants are you a green room knight yet? have you read this week's Squills?
here's the thing - I'm not an angry feminist, I think I should say - except that I am, every shred of evidence is against me
it shouldn't bother me, I know, but it gets wearing - every conversation opens with "I'm one of the doctors" and ends with "Thanks, Nurse."
Sometimes it makes me want to grab my stethoscope, point to how I just spoke to them about their medications and ask: what is it that makes a doctor to you? Is it a medical degree? Or a Y chromosome?
And it's a frustration that can't be aired outside the patient's room - you can't insult the nurses by suggesting you are insulted to be called a nurse (its not that. It's really not that.)
the male doctors laugh it off - they don't hear it - and I never thought it was true that men didn't hear women speak but every turn I take it makes itself true.
Besides, complaining about it (the dozen times a day a man shouts "Nurse!" in my direction) would just make me an angry feminist and we all know that men make better doctors anyway, don't we?
And I don't know why I'm getting my back up about it - after all - as he so kindly reminded me - I'm taking the easy way out - I'm doing psychiatry - and psychiatrists aren't real doctors and neither are women - aha, I suppose it all makes sense to me now
Thank you for explaining.
"Stella. You were in my dream the other night. And everyone called you Princess." -Lauren2010
I am standing alone in a room with a body, the pulp of my fingers pressed to her still warm wrist. I keep waiting for a pulse to present itself, forgetting I am here to prove its absence. Peel back an eyelid and there are the glass globes, staring up to heaven. Searching for her soul.
Someone always interrupts when you are listening to a dead person's heart, and you feel like an idiot, but that is what you are there to do, to confirm there is no knock on their ribcage, no response to pain no matter how hard you try.
I see a lot of death, but tragedy is rarer. Death is beautiful, dignified, peaceful - and it does not prepare you
not for the thirty-two year old going through the process fifty years too early,
not for a new father, staff elbow deep in his blood without a hope of resuscitation
nor for the teenage girl who drops dead with no warning, her teenage boyfriend staring horrified, thinking it is something he's done.
it cannot prepare you for a lady advanced in years, who smiled so well only two days ago, And whose heart, at six this morning, suddenly stopped. For no reason. And everything was done. We did all our tricks. And she was gone.
Death is death and death can be a happy ending, but tragedy is tragedy and there is only bitterness in that.
"Stella. You were in my dream the other night. And everyone called you Princess." -Lauren2010
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