Hidden Trauma

On late nights the hum and crackle of fluorescent lights echoes in the halls. Dr. Hutchinson says it will drive him mad, that or the sheer lack of work on the night shift. It’s an anonymous hospital, barely Level IV, and on weeknights the county can only afford Dr. Hutchinson and his regular assistants. The first time we worked together was the most recent, a month, two weeks, and three days ago, when a kid from Burns decided .08 was a better minimum blood alcohol content and hit geologic debris left over from the winter landslides on a second hand Yamaha. The barbed wire caught him before he could get far enough from the road not to be noticed, but his true moment of fortune came in falling under Dr. Hutchinson’s care. Our care.

There is no transgression more heinous than demeaning a surgeon’s hands. I don’t understand why anyone else thinks they have the right to touch them. He could feel the concavity from tiny fractures in the femur while he helped the paramedics get the motorcyclist on the operating table, could tell the pulse before the bulky machines in the corner, all older than he was but no more experienced. I worried when the paramedics left—we were alone together—but he held me with such steady fingers and whispered such convincing reassurances. We made the incision to check the abdomen and chest cavity for ruptures and hidden trauma. To the day I brag about being there for the man’s first hollow organ perforation, that I helped. I never thought I would see precision to best my own.

Now across the hall his wedding ring slides on and off the digitus medicinalis, and he watches a photograph of his wife as though she will soon run from the frame. When we’re alone, he tells me about her frequent drives with her friends. He wonders how she has changed in the weeks since his hours have not allowed them to share a bed, and I never have an answer; I know he would much rather be spending the night with me. After all, I understand the profession. I understand what those hands truly long to hold.

The phone rings and Dr. Hutchinson scurries to find the scrubs he secretly hoped he would get to don tonight. Waiting in the operating room, I can hear the wheels of the cart crashing down the hallway and the squeak of the paramedics’ sneakers on the vintage linoleum. Dr. Hutchinson makes a comment about drivers out here drinking like they had taxi to rely on, and none of the paramedics laugh.

The passenger died, can’t identify her through the burns, and they have another accident forty miles south of here to get to. Of course he can take care of it?

Of course. The driver never dies, does he? This is one of those talking nights. He comments on how nice it would be to have a scrub tech, or even a resident. I want to tell him I don’t mind, but we’re already cutting into the abdomen, uncomfortable with the swelling. The liver is slightly hemorrhaged, he sighs. It’s not fatal, but…

With a clatter, the tray lodging the patient’s personal belongings falls to the ground by the door. His nerves are shot from these past few days, and he instinctively swears and pivots, looking to where a wallet has prostrated itself and exposed its contents. Against the white tile, the red of one of those tacky instant-photo backgrounds is like a streak of blood. Our patient is smiling in the photo, but not as brightly as the woman he holds. The cloth of the mask collapses and inflates with the rage in Dr. Hutchinson’s breath. Then those hands grow tight, gripping me not like an instrument but like something primordial, something hewn from stone.

The passenger died, can’t identify her through the burns.

The glove falls to the floor first, and then the ring flashes silver on top of it. She never looked that happy in any of the pictures on Dr. Hutchinson’s desk. Ignoring the liver, he opens the chest cavity in a quick, shaken line. I’m cutting away at the muscle between ribs, cutting a window to the patient’s faintly beating heart, and stabbing, stabbing twice for every time he screams the man is a murderer and his dead wife a whore.

Human heart and human anger stop beating together, and he abandons me for the ring. It slides on easily, lubricated by the blood. They can’t be his hands anymore, the way they’re shaking. I drown in sterilizing fluid, a dull and stained edge, hearing the mantra that lets him stitch the incisions, dead before I could do anything, dead before I could do anything…