Surgery 1

A dark skinned man lies naked on his side, on the table in the centre of the small windowless room. His back is strangely curved, indicating a spinal deformity. Five people dressed in blue, with masks and caps and only eyes exposed, go about their tasks at various stations. They seem oblivious to this body, which is still and bent and unconscious. I see all this through a glass pane in the door, which lets me look into a different world that few are allowed to view.

I am in the pre-surgery area of a busy hospital, here to witness two major surgeries - a spinal procedure and a heart bypass operation. The orthopedic surgeon has scrubbed his hands for 10 minutes and now invites me to enter the operation theatre with him. The room is very cold and the smell of disinfectant is overpowering. Soon the second surgeon walks in and it is unreal to hear them greet each other in what must, for them, be an everyday environment. One comments on the music that is playing, ribbing the other about his preference for romantic melodies. The anesthetist arranges for me to stand on a small stool, for a better view. He explains that he must keep this patient under: not too long, not too short, not too deep and not too shallow…

By now the man is draped in green sheets and only a square patch of his skin is exposed, painted thoroughly with a pungent yellow solution. It strikes me that they approach this square patch as a work station, perhaps they need to forget there is a living breathing man beneath the drapes. The surgeon explains that this spine, which has been bent for over 30 years, will not be straightened with this surgery. But the excruciating pain from pressure on nerve-endings, that now keeps this man bed-ridden, will be gone and let him walk again. The hand that cuts the skin is steady (we have all heard speak of surgical precision) and the edges are cauterized immediately to stem the bleeding. The burning skin emits a nauseating smell.

So many thoughts pass through my mind during the next two hours… The instruments and implants are not dissimilar to a carpenter’s tools - hammers, screws, saws, pliers. It must take tremendous strength, focus and endurance to do this work. How fragile the human body is, where the smallest damage to narrow thread-like nerves can result in unspeakable outcomes. How strong the human body is, where this intervention and even the introduction of foreign implants will be accepted - bones will join, blood will coagulate, skin will heal. This man was not known to me and he will never be known to me, yet I have seen him in a way that is more than intimate. I have seen the spine that is linked to his brain, I have seen the lungs that inhale and exhale his breath. I don’t know about him, but I am changed forever.