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Before
and AfterThe OR nurse is
almost unrecognized in the halls where her full face shows, breath openly
contaminates the air, sneezes spraying , laughing and eating, touching everything
with naked fingers, where her body is revealed and she walks like a woman,
hips bumping into edges, hair hanging loose, limbs crossing over surfaces
until nothing is clean. The OR nurse washes her hands before and after
and before and after and before and after, she strips scrub and pees and
looks for blood, wishes for it, waits for it, washes her hands before and
after and still nothing. She stands on a step stool at the edge of the sterile
field, as a cyst the size of her head is lifted from the belly. This becomes
the specific nightmare of the OR nurse, that something huge like that grows
in her without telling. The surgeon laughs "oh, we would tell you,"
as if he would know, as if anyone can see anything happening, all the
malignant possibilities lurking their time under the layers, epidermis, dermis,
subcutaneous fat, fascia, serosa, muscle, cavity. For example between cases
she is washing her hands before and after and looking for blood until she
comes to know it won't be there. She stands at the stirruped legs of a D and
C, watching thick plum tissue whisked out through the cervix, away through
a tube, measured in a fat clean jar. All she has to do is ask, the doctor
will slip her a drug that costs sixteen cents, maybe fifty dollars on the
streets of Mexico, but free to an OR nurse, to save her from a waiting room
of a clinic in another city. White baby aspirin size salvation. At the sink
the doctor scrubs skin from his forearms, his wrists, under his nails, giving
her instructions to solve the bleeding, really just a matter of disrupting
extra cells, like washing hands the way they were taught, how warm water
lifts oils from crevices, soap emulsifies, and friction. It's a matter of
some vigorous intent, time, devotion to the task. No crying will be necessary,
before or after. The OR nurse notes significant times: patient in the room,
surgeon in the room, anesthesia begun, complete, first cutting, closing,
and anesthesia rolled backwards like time in a rug, like an hourglass tipped
on end. She counts the sponges, the sharps, the blades. It's a matter
of what should be there, inside, and what should not. © 1997 Jessica
Manke (bio)
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