TIME OUT

Confirm patient.
Confirmed.
Confirm procedure.
Confirmed.
Confirm site.
Marked.
Blood available.
Yes.
Imaging displayed.
Yes.

What does he need his body for?

The room does not have
a checkbox for this.

There is no line on the board for
kneels beside the bathtub
to wash his daughter’s hair.

No field for
plays piano badly but every Sunday.

No red bracelet that says
would rather have six months at home
than twelve spent recovering.

No place to document
his wife died three years ago
and he has been afraid of hospitals since.

Still,
someone has to ask him
what he is trying to get back to.

I have spent enough time
around surgery
to understand its verbs:

resect.
divide.
staple.
anastomose.

They are clean words.
They know exactly
where they end.

But patients speak
in messier ones.

Hold.
Drive.
Work.
Eat.
Sleep beside.
Pick up.
Recognize myself.

There is no code
for recognize myself.

So sometimes
it reaches the operating room
only by accident,

carried in by the nurse
who heard him tell his wife
he was more frightened
of the ostomy than the cancer,

or by the daughter
who interrupts the consent
to say,

“Wait.

You keep telling us
what you can do.

Can someone tell me
what he will be like afterward?”

And for a moment,
the body on the table
has a life
outside the room.

Medicine likes its heroes
visible:

hands inside a chest,
a surgeon coming out
after midnight,
the tumor held up
as proof that something
was defeated.

But what about the person
who stops the room instead?

The one who asks,
before we take
what we know how to take,

What can this patient
not afford to lose?

Every operation
contains two anatomies:

the one we study
and the one
the patient will have to live in.

Only one of them
is drawn in the textbook.

So before incision,

confirm patient.
Confirmed.
Confirm procedure.
Confirmed.
Confirm site.
Marked.

And then,

before we call it
saving a life,

someone please ask
which parts of it
they were hoping
we would save.

Sarah Ali is an MD/MPH student at the UAB Heersink School of Medicine. Through her writing, she explores the human experiences that exist alongside illness and care, with particular attention to the moments that can be overlooked in clinical medicine. She hopes to center the human side of medicine in both her writing and the way she cares for patients.