Free A History of the Present Illness by Louise Aronson Page B

said, throwing a quarter into the air. The winner would get the privilege of pulling a scalpel from the base of Cherry’s neck to her pubis.Daniel called heads, then shoved his brother and grabbed the coin midair. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “This is so mine!”
    It was tails. I lost next, and David came up short in the final round. Hank opened the manual to the correct page, drew a line along the torso with a black marker, and handed me his scalpel. “Because I know I’m sometimes an asshole,” he said.
    My first incision didn’t even sever the skin. I made a second pass, then a third before the job was done. The texture was nothing like real skin. The preservative had made it tougher and more rubbery, which turned out to be useful; the harder I pressed, the less my hand shook as I cut.
    After that, we divided the work geographically. Up top, Dan and Dave cut along the rim of Cherry’s sparse hair. They planned to lift off a window of skull and harvest the brain. A bucket of formaldehyde stood waiting on the counter behind our table. Farther down, Hank and I worked separately, he in Cherry’s chest and me in her abdomen. He cut with surgical deliberation; I figured she was already dead, and all that mattered was getting inside.
    My hands began to itch in the latex gloves. The smell of formaldehyde, pungent and noxious, seeped into my clothes and hair. I kept glancing at the ridge of thick brown moles under Cherry’s right breast, and also at her feet, the gnarled toes heaped upon one another like stacked corpses.
    â€œYou okay?” Hank whispered.
    I nodded, afraid to speak.
    Pulling back flaps of skin, I lifted internal organs to feel each one’s heft in my palm. I had so much to learn, and found that my memory worked best through my eyes and hands. I held Cherry’s bilobar liver, purple and cobbled when it should have been reddish and smooth; a small, dense kidney, curled up on its side like a sleeping fetus; heaped, pallid coils ofintestine—enough, we’d been told, to cover the length of a football field end zone; and, finally, Cherry’s uterus, shrunken to a nubbin the size of my thumb.
    â€œWow,” Hank said, moving closer. “Is that what I think it is?”
    The guys were all staring.
    â€œOh, man,” Dan said. “Is that possible?” He pointed at what appeared to be a single strand of shredded dental floss dangling from the tiny organ. Maybe Cherry had had only one fallopian tube, the other taken in surgery or atrophied to invisibility. More likely, I’d severed it without even noticing.
    Hank’s shoulder pressed into mine and he shrugged.
    A handful of students, all women, cried during the two-month anatomy course. They left the room, missed entire organ systems. Not me; to those who weren’t looking closely, I was as tough as any guy.
PERSONAL POLITICS
    Twice a month during that first year, as part of a pi lot program to get beginning students out of the classroom and into the real world of medicine, I followed Dr. Bernard Nercessian on rounds on the Rehab and Extended Care Building of the veterans hospital. At one P.M. on alternate Thursdays, he greeted me with an enthusiastic handshake and handed me his spare stethoscope. As we rounded, he introduced me to his patients, lowering his voice to name my medical school, as if the honor was his and my presence beside him proof positive of his own competence and stature.
    Dr. Nercessian’s patients were mostly returned from Iraqand Afghanistan, and they followed military etiquette despite being so damaged that dispositions other than discharge were out of the question. They said, “Yes, sir, doctor”; “Copy that, doctor”; “Thank you, doctor, sir.” Sometimes they thanked me also, even though almost all I did was watch. But sometimes, too, after Dr. Nercessian was out the door, the patients looked at me and said, “Miss, I need a