Going Under The Knife

This piece was was beautifully crafted with artful language; I loved every bit of it. Selzer describes the knife by ways of describing his job as a surgeon; they are one in the same, the knife helps him complete his work. For him to do this gives detail and new images. It's not like he is saying the knife is this, he's saying the knife is like a surgeon who is like an executioner and here's why. Then he goes into a story to back it up. It really does grab the reader's attention.

There were some stories that I wished I knew the ending of. For example, by the end of the first story I wanted to know if he got the tumor out without killing the woman. Or even what happened to the Russian man with the hernia. His stories came to life with the conversational language that he used. Sure there were some words that I had to look up, but that was mostly medical language. Everything else was as if he were telling the stories to me at dinner. I do have family members in the medical field, so these stories aren't too far off from what I'd hear over dinner.

One story that he told that was quite interesting was the one where the knife takes a life of its own. This scares me a bit. It's almost as if he is questioning his own ability to use the knife. But then it also has the sense that knives are unruly and it's a surgeon that must tame them. It's just the line, "in a surgical operation, a risk may flash into reality: the patient dies...of complication. The patient knows this too..." that bothers me (713). He seems conflicted that if he were to lose control of the knife and let it do what it wants then he also loses the patient.

Which anyone who has gone into an operation has had this terrible feeling that it's possible they were never to return again. It's a feeling that Selzer addresses quite well, although he looks at it from the surgeon point of view. I had never before thought that surgeons get nervous about an operation, but that should go under the same absurdities like seasoned actors and singers never get nervous before going on stage or tenured teachers never get nervous before they meet a group of new students. It just shows that everyone is human and we do all have the same emotions.