Cathedral of the Body

It’s 10 a.m. I’m sitting in the surgical waiting room with my brother-in-law John and my nephew Kevin. It will be five hours total before my sister’s surgery is over. Yes. The decision was made to operate. We were to be at the hospital at 6:30 to give her our last hugs. At 6 the nurse came in and imperiously announced that O.R. was ready, they had to go now. My sister Millie teared up. “Tell John I love him,” she said. I was furious but not showing it. They’d said 6:30. But happily, John and Kevin walked in just that minute. In pre-op, the surgeon put her MRI pictures on the screen one after another, proving to us again the necessity of this, what vertebrae had to be fused, which would be optional.  She’s been in terrible pain for months, so doped up with Morphine, Percocet, etc., that she hardly knows who she is.There’s relief in turning to the clinical, the mathematical, the exact cut. Pain is nebulous—“Can you rate your pain from 1-10?” Who knows? Her life has been a series of clinical descriptions ever since the brain tumor eight years ago. Here we are again in another cathedral of the body, among the comforting rituals that, temporarily at least, convince us that things are under control, that the body has been intricately mapped and labeled, the scans are as deep as it goes, there is nothing that is not seen, nothing that has not been identified and studied. The patient is etherized upon a table. The part, if we can call it that, that is uncontrollable, emotional, vague, is asleep.I’m watching the screen, exactly like the ones in the airport.  Her surgeon’s name scrolls by with the notation, OR, and the estimated out time as 1:01. The woman at the desk says the time is a national average for this surgery.  This is a scary surgery, ruptured disk, scoliosis, narrowed passageways for the spine. Her blood pressure and other functioning must be closely watched, since she has no functioning pituitary gland, no central control system. Her body depends on corticosteroids. But you don’t want to hear all this detail. It is, I have to say, a seductive circularity, the passageways into the body, the journey to the center of the earth that fascinates and beckons: keep going, keep going. The discriminations get finer and finer, farther and farther from the tenuousness, the love, the fear.I am thinking about how we divide things, set things apart from each other, which is the function of ritual. How discrimination is both the scientific method and the religious one. It’s the ladder we’ve used to climb up from the swamp. But there’s no ladder and no swamp. We invented this ladder to get us from one place to another from heaven to hell, from ignorance to knowledge, when it was all the same place. All I’m saying is, beyond—if that’s the right word—the discriminations seems important to acknowledge. To see.I string these marks across the page. You read them and we have similar but not identical mental pictures. This is the science of writing, and a very good thing for us all. I get to enjoy a sense of control over this  situation and you get to enjoy “getting” my words, which, in this instance, is your control. But let us not kid ourselves that we are in control.So we’re sitting here waiting and will be for several more hours. We each have our laptops going. I trust all will go well. I remember when Millie went in for her initial brain surgery. As they wheeled her away down the hall, she raised her arm and called out, “Give me a B! Give me a R! Give me an A! Give me an I! Give me an N! What's it spell?"“Brian?” her son David answered.