I don't like gore. I’m the kind of person who won’t recklessly channel-surf for fear that the changer gizmo will maliciously lock onto our 24/7 surgery channel, where some poor soul's innards will be on garish hi-def display, And yet, despite my squeamishness, I steeled myself and read right through Katrina Firlik's Another Day in the Frontal Lobe, which is a young neurosurgeon’s bildungs-autobiography. Of course, I allowed myself the indulgence of zooming through some of the more gruesome parts. How much does a guy need to know about maggot infestations in the living brain?
I’m grateful to Firlik for her vivid stories, for the occasional moment of black humor and also for offering a forthright glimpse into an alternative world. Nevertheless, I'm sorry to report, Another Day is not a good book. It's too transparently a package shaped by agent and editor for short-term commercial appeal. The author is so anxious to be cute and to be loved –- she must have been one of those front-row, admiring-eyes-glued-to-the-professor straight-A pupils -- that whenever she comes up against a controversial topic, such as the irrational funding of our medical system or the egomania of surgeons or the morality of expensive, hopeless last-minute-before-dying surgical interventions, she hints at concern but then swerves and punts. She doesn't want to offend a single potential buyer.
Not a courageous writer, she is not an admirable being either: what can one say about a highly-skilled professional who turns down job after job in the American hinterland and elects to live in New Canaan, Connecticut, because, she admits, it would be impossible to find a good Japanese restaurant in the sticks?, and who in one sentence notes that her rich town has more neurosurgeons than all of sub-Sahara Africa and in another reveals that she works on spines rather than brains nowadays because spines are more lucrative.
Hey, Katrina, the next time you publish something, sacrifice some of that royalty money and write directly from your heart (even though it's one cold and stony organ).
Readers of this blague will not be surprised to learn that Dr. M. was much intrigued by the book's medical vocabulary. Another Day serves up a feast of beautiful and exotic words: venous infarct, dura, spicule, rongeur, neuroma, glioma, glioblastoma (you don’t want one!), bone dust, debulk, pachygyria. The ugliest of all: intubated. My personal favorite, and a word that I've now put in the running for Word of the Year: bezoar.
How could I have lived all these years without knowing the wonderful word bezoar? Could there be a surer index of my ignorance of medicine? A bezoar, as everyone but me seems to know, is a concretion of indigestible stuff stuck somewhere in the digestive tract – hairballs, medicines, bits of food. Sometimes they can be dissolved, but on occasions they can only be removed by surgery. A bezoar was formerly thought to be a magical antidote for poisons –- so score another couple of strikes against our ignorant superstitious ancestors. The most common kind of bezoar is the phytobezoar, which is a collection of lignin, cellulose, or tannin of food fibers. Common sources are celery, grapes, raisins, prunes, and pumpkins, all of which, if you’re like me, you’ve probably unwittingly eaten without having given a thought to their bezoar-potential and therefore neglected a splendid opportunity for hypochondria.
A bezoar caused by eating persimmons (an especially dangerous fruit, bezoarwise), earns its very own word-- diospyrobezoar -- an odd amalgam of Greek and Persian linguistic roots and a word which, just as soon as a suitable opening arises, I intend to enthusiastically insinuate into the conversation.
Comments