surgery / strength

A few weeks ago I finished my two month surgery rotation. As with much of this year, and more so with this rotation that consumed more time and energy than any other, I felt the need for catch-up, a need never fulfilled because of the constant forward momentum that is med school. I don't think I'll ever do reflection full justice; it's gotten to be too hard to even just describe. I think a lot will be lost in time and memory, but so it goes. I keep saving it up for later, later; at the very least, next year I will put aside blocks of time for this later. It's my main consolation during this time, a time when as much as I want to put everything I'm experiencing down, I also just want to experience. Which is one of several things surgery taught me to do better.

Surgery seemed to me a lesson in survival--not just in the sense of getting through, but of gaining strength. On a concrete level, I learned to pay better attention to my body's basic needs. Eat at any chance, eat two breakfasts (when you first wake up at four in the morning, and then at the normal breakfast hour). Before a long surgery, hydrate and use the restroom. Running on graham crackers, peanut butter, and apple juice (consumed at each and every break) made me strangely aware of pockets of emptiness inside me and how they fill up.

Standing for most of the day also motivates movement. It was on surgery that I went from running a few times a week to every day. You'd think that you'd be too tired after a fourteen hour day in the hospital, but it was actually the one thing that gave me energy at the end of the day. I tried variations of running longer and faster, and everything felt good. It wasn't just counteracting physical stillness; it was battling the sense of having spent most of the day doing very little. No matter how it ends, time spent running is time well spent, and there is an individual sense of having done something. There's no particular goal other than to do it, which I could also say about days of work, but in this case it's solely my decision telling my legs what to do. Besides broadening things that were comfortable for me, I found it useful to try new things (squash, rock climbing), none of which I'm good at, but the topic of how I'm not good at most of the things I enjoy is for another time. The rigidity of schedule forced me to flex other parts of life, and being mindful relieves some of the sting of the numbness I slipped into during long hours of watching, not really seeing.

Despite this complaint, it jars me to think of how much there is to feel and say as a result of my surgery rotation. Because there were substantial things to see, and besides building up some inner muscle in fighting for life outside the operating room, I found myself with much admiration and respect for the strength of people. As usual it's beyond me to articulate in this venue, and is something I'm saving. Briefly, I think that transplant surgery (the most exhausting, and best, part of my rotation) sets much of the tone for what seeing organs can do for a person. Transplant surgery, which deserves many writings, was an amazing thing to see--to see people give to and receive from one another, with natural humility and generosity. To see the liver charred black as it's cut and burned, so that it can be given away, renders more sharply the outlines of what it means to donate. To feel the liver in a new body grow from cold to hot in your hands, as foreign blood warms it, made the idea of a gift something to carry and hold. A mother to her daughter, a young aunt to her nephew suddenly inexplicably ill, a fiance to his fiance. They seem like easy enough decisions, but they're not simply decisions in concept. They are procedures felt with scared tears preceding, and recoveries borne with tangible changes after.