Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [29]
But at this moment, with Sister Mary Joseph Praise's lips ashen, her breathing shallow, her eyes seeing past him, her unrelenting bleeding, and then with Matron having passed the baton to him, Stone was speechless. He was experiencing the helplessness that patients’ relatives must feel, and he didn't like it in the least bit. His lips trembled and he felt shame at how his wet face displayed his emotions. But more than that he felt fear, and an astonishing paralysis of thought which only shamed him further.
When he finally spoke it was to say in a quavering voice, “Where is Hemlatha? Why isn't she back? We need her,” which was an act of uncharacteristic humility.
He swiped at his eyes using the back of his forearm, a childlike gesture. Matron watched in disbelief: instead of taking the stool she offered, he retreated. Stone walked to the wall that bore the marks of his anger. He struck his head on the plastered surface, a head butt worthy of a mountain goat. His legs wobbled. He clung to the glass cabinet. Matron felt obliged to murmur “Completely useless” on the off chance that if his violence had meaning, God forbid it should fail for lack of its accompanying mantra.
True, Stone could have done a Cesarean section, though, strangely for a tropical surgeon, it was one of the few operations he hadn't done. “See One, Do One, Teach One” was a chapter heading in his textbook, The Expedient Operator: A Short Practice of Tropical Surgery. But what his readers didn't know, and what I learned only many years later, was that he had an aversion to anything gynecological (not to mention anything obstetrical). It stemmed from his final year of medical school, when he did what was unheard of: he bought his very own cadaver so that he could master the anatomy he had already learned so well on a shared cadaver in his first year of medical school. The male poorhouse specimen of his first-year anatomy class had been ancient and shriveled with ghostly muscles and tendons, such being the common tender of Edinburgh anatomy theaters. He'd shared that body with five other students. But he lucked out with the cadaver he purchased in his final year: a well-fed, middle-aged female, a type he associated with the linoleum factories in Fife. Stone's dissection of the hand was so elegant (with just the tendon sheath exposed on the middle finger, while on the ring finger he carried it further to lay open the sheath and show the tendons of flexor sublimis like the wires of a suspension bridge, the profundus tendon coursing between them) that the anatomy professor preserved it to show the first-year students. For weeks Thomas Stone toiled over his cadaver, spending more time with her than he had with any other female save his mother. He felt an ease with her, a fluency that came from intimate knowledge. On one side, he had filleted her cheek to the ear, tying the flap back with sutures to expose the parotid gland and the facial nerve passing through, its branches splayed out like a goose's foot, hence the name pes anserinus. On the other side of the face hed removed all subcutaneous tissue and fat to reveal the myriad muscles of expression whose concerted movements in life had conveyed her sorrow, joy, and every emotion in between. He didn't think of her as a person. She was simply knowledge embodied, embalmed, and personified. Every evening he folded back the muscles and then the skin flaps dangling on narrow hinges, and then he spread the formalin-soaked rags over her to ensheathe her. Sometimes when he fastened the rubber sheet around her and tucked the edges in, it reminded him of his mother's ritual of putting him to bed. Back in his room, his solitude and loneliness always felt