Pardon if the punctuation is loose, the memory fuzzed. I had surgery this morning. A small repair to my left hand. Still, midazolam is taking its sweet time through its half-life. I’m blowtorching sentences out of cobwebbed corners.
Let us begin and pray the midazolam picks up the metabolic pace.
The hardest year of my life, upon review, was not the year I’d long presumed it was: intern year, my first year in the LBC. Rather, it was two years prior, the third year of medical school in Oklahoma.
My first rotation was general surgery. Sterile personalities, sterile curiosity, sterile fields. A hellscape draped in baby blue. I walked in at 0530 in baby blue scrubs, scrubbed into baby blue surgical gowns, dawned baby blue surgical gloves, then tremulously learned to suture, an exercise in smearing warm, slimy, ruby-red blood everywhere. Thank god for the white OR walls. A screen for dreams, visions of riding waves, of dating a yogi, of a normal sleep schedule. These 12-to-16-hour days went on for eight weeks. I can’t fathom how I survived it, nor the rotations that came after it.
This morning, Keti and I walked into the surgery center at 0630. I signed releases for everything but a sinkhole engulfing the hospital, then waited for the scalpel, waited for my first trip back to the great white room.
“Alright Ryan, you ready for me to wheel you back?” I was serenely ready, oddly. The pre-op nurse unlocked the gurney’s wheels. We rolled, I told Keti I loved her, the midazolam kicked, then we were inside the operating room.
Mötley Crüe was playing. A scrub tech was assembling the instrument table. I was parked next to the anesthesiologist’s sci-fi, NASA station. All of it was so familiar and reassuring, like Jack back in the Gold Room. I remembered the voices of residents and attendings, their indefensible yet indispensable jokes. I thought about the nurses and scrub techs, their patience as I failed repeatedly to keep the scope on the bile duct. I remembered the gargantuan sense of pride when I finally “sewed someone up” on my own during the last week of the rotation, shaking my resident’s hands afterward.
“The anesthesia’s running,” the nurse anesthetist whispered. “We’ll see you soon.”
The walls were white, the fluorescent light even whiter as I looked at the ceiling. Tears welled in the corners of my eyes. I’d been here before, I knew this place, I was so grateful. And now, the whole memory was mine, survived not by daydreaming through its sterility, but by the guidance and aliveness of its people. Resentment blinds.
And if that’s the worst year of my life, I’m one lucky… Then, the lights went out.
To livin’ a life we love,
Ryan Fightmaster, MD
