Insensible Loss

I spend my days and nights invading strangers’ bodies. I put my finger in their mouths and gag them, feeling for firmness suggesting tumors; I snake a thin camera through their nostrils and into their throats to see the organ that gives these strangers their voices. I assess bodies impassively, looking for infection, inflammation, hidden cancer. I cut bodies open, dissecting them layer by layer; I suture them back together again using needles curved like hawks’ talons. Strangers’ bodies are where I work and where I learn. I know things about my patients’ bodies that they don’t know and can’t see. I know things about them that they have no reason to know. Some people want to see inside themselves, and they ask if their operations can be filmed, or if they can take their tumors home. “Where do my tonsils go after the operation?” one patient asked me during my training. “Do you keep them in a jar, and once the jar is full, you get to graduate?”

I change my patients’ bodies in meaningful and irreversible ways. I remove tumors that have taken over their tongues, jaws, voice boxes. I rebuild them with pieces of themselves: segments of fibula bone, skin from their forearms, muscle from their thighs. I hope that they will regain use of the parts that cancer took from them, but there is sometimes no way to know. I feel a terrible responsibility for every sensation they feel after surgery, knowing that pain will be part of the contract, not knowing how much each individual will bear.

I tell people to trust their bodies to heal after surgery. “Listen to your body,” I tell them. “Everybody heals differently,” I say when they ask how long it will take to feel a new sense of normal. “You’ll know if there’s a problem. Your body will tell you.”

I tell them this while knowing that my body no longer bothers to tell me much of anything at all.

The irony of my profession is that while learning deep truths about the bodies of strangers, I have ignored my own. I have stood for hours in the operating room, forcing hunger to extinguish itself, willing