Scythe Upon the Grasses Some must employ the scythe Upon the grasses, That the walks be smooth For the feet of the angel. ~Philip Larkin That January, I was an intern on General Surgery, working 100-hour workweeks. Every fifth night, I took overnight call, covering more than five dozen hospitalized patients, including complicated Cardiothoracic and Transplant patients, in addition to handling direct admissions. There would be life-and-death crises. When I was on call, I wouldn’t get a lick of sleep all night. Dr. Bellaire was the bright light of that month for me. He was bookish and intellectually inclined like me; we could talk to each other. This mattered for a lot when I felt like an outsider, not only as a woman in surgical training, but also as a Southerner relocated to Minnesota just six months before. When we would rhapsodize about Plato and Shakespeare over our hernia repairs and appendectomies, I’d regret that he had to be twice my age and my attending. I would thrill when he put his gloved hand on mine to guide my instrument, or when we made eye contact over our masks; his eyes behind his glasses had a soulfulness to them. During one hernia case he asked me, as we dissected the abdominal wall, “What three arteries do you expect to find at about this level?” Although it was possible that his question was directed at our medical student, I was eager to impress him, so I spoke up quickly: “The superficial external pudendal, the superficial circumflex iliac, and the superficial epigastric.” He replied, “Wow! I’m impressed! I’ve never heard an intern reel off the right answer like that.” I’m generally suspicious of compliments, but this one was even more suspect: how could that be true? Didn’t categorical interns actually study this stuff? Then he cast a shadow on the whole thing by saying, “Did someone tip you off that I always ask that question?” I was taken aback, deflated. Absolutely no one had tipped me off. Credit was due to my own insight into what to read the night before, not to someone helping me cheat, and I was irked that I had no way to prove it. One Wednesday evening late in the month, Dr. Bellaire came into the physician workroom as I was signing out to the intern on call. There were going to be two organ procurements that night: would I be available to help? I was no longer on his service by then, so this would be purely voluntary. The pain of it was that I’d been hours away from only my third day off in nearly four long weeks. Transplant also wasn’t important for me to learn, given that I wasn’t planning to become a general surgeon. Tactfully hesitating, I asked, “Will I be useful?” I knew he was already going to have a fellow, someone five years senior to me, as his first assistant. “You will be,” he said, and that was enough for me to take it. The plan, he said, was as follows: a taxi would pick us up outside our emergency room at 10 PM and take us to the first hospital, where a team from the Mayo Clinic would be harvesting the liver. We’d take the
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