Pretty Little Butcher: Memoirs of a Female Thoracic Surgeon

on beauty

There are people who always encourage others to "write what you know". I don't completely agree with the concept. I mean, shall we all just publish our diaries? What about all the stories about ancient Egypt, serial killers and vampires? 

However, I realized there is something I want to write about, something I know very well.

Doctors.

Physicians. Surgeons. Obstetricians.

Talking about them. Admiring them. Working beside them. Dating them.

And of course, becoming one of them.

I'm not the respected type who speaks words of wisdom and dreams of following Albert Schweitzer's footsteps. I became a doctor because that's what everyone in our generation did (everyone who did decent enough in school, that is), and slowly my journey began from a naïve young girl who knew more about Tiffany's open heart ring than an open heart operation, to a fully-trained, somewhat cynical young woman who cuts people open for a living.

No that's not exactly true. We have video-assisted thoracoscopy now, which means we can produce a one-centimeter hole on the side of the patient's body, insert a camera which allows us to look inside the chest cavity, and finish the operation in a clean and precise manner. So no, we don't cut people open anymore, thank you very much.

***

I watched in awe as the chief resident of the chest surgery department dropped a piece of lung into a steel basin. It landed with a dull thud, and a few droplets of blood spilled. The piece of lung was shriveled, dark red in color like a marinated plum, glistening with pleural fluid under the chilly air in the operating room.

The lung really is a pretty amazing piece of organ. There are 2 lobes on the left side and three on the right, which fill up the entire chest cavity when inflated. It looks like a pink sponge, which depresses ever so slightly to touch, and bounces right back to its original position when you release the pressure. However, once the air leaves, a lobe can be squeezed through a three-centimeter-wide opening we made on the side of the body. The lung, like the penis, looks so different in on and off mode.

I was 24 years old, a starry-eyed intern doctor, clad in my scrubs and dispensable operating cap, and I marveled at the operation I just witnessed. I wasn't allowed to do much more than suturing up the outermost layer of skin, but just to be able to hold a needle-holder in one hand and a clamp in the other was enough gratification for standing through a three-hour operation.

The chief resident picked up the basin and shook it in front of my face ever-so-slightly.

"You don't find this gross?" he said, a hint of arrogance in his tone, suggesting that he was much cooler than I was and that nothing fazed him. "Why would a pretty little girl like you want to be a surgeon? You should be a dermatologist."

"I like using the knife," I replied, at the time not yet offended by this type of presumption that girls are not tough enough. "It's either a surgeon or a chef for me."

He was hardly amused by my reply. "It's pretty hard work."

"I know," I said. We went back to our task at hand. I sutured up the patient, put clean gauze on to cover the wounds, and fixed the chest tube that was coming out of the side of the body. He typed up the operation note, explaining in details what we just did. A lobectomy, that is, which means the excision of an entire lobe of lung.

"Does it ever bore you, doing the same operation over and over again?" I asked.

"Never." He looked up and glanced at me, confidence shining through his eyes. "Every lung is different."

***

Over time, whenever a fellow doctor hears of my career choice, I would hear the same type of remark.

"You are too beautiful to be a surgeon." Um, ok. I didn't realize the basic requirement of being a surgeon is an ugly face.

"Whatever happened in your life to make you pick this path?" Some childhood trauma, I suppose, which has made me mentally screwed up.

"You are going to quit in a year and switch to some easier field like ophthalmology, where you can wear designer clothes and get off work on time." I can still wear designer clothes, ok? I'm wearing a Van Cleef & Arpels necklace underneath my white coat.

"You look more like a drug rep than a doctor." The highest compliment you can pay is probably this, actually. We have a few drug representatives in our hospital and they are fairly easy to spot. They are the most glamorous people here, dressed either in expensive suits or tight skirts with high heels. They hand you their cards and ask you to consider prescribing the brand of drugs they are promoting.

At first I focused on the positive and regarded these comments as a clumsy way of them telling me I was good-looking. Gradually I realized that beauty is my original sin. Whatever accomplishment I might have, it's easy to blame it on my appearance.

One of my colleagues once told me of an attending doctor who was short-tempered and very mean. He told me to be careful, but after my one-month rotation, I decided that the said attending was actually very nice. He was appreciative of my work ethics and told me that he would be delighted if I ever consider joining his department.

"Ah, it's good to be beautiful," my male colleague said with envy.

Another one of my co-workers told me that in the middle of the operation, the chief resident had to leave to check on a patient, and before he left he told my colleague not to touch anything before he got back. My colleague stood in the operating room for twenty minutes, trying to make small talk with the nurse to pass the awkward silence. A few weeks later the same thing happened to me, but the chief resident instructed me to carry on what he was doing.

"It's good to be beautiful."

Yup, here we go again.

***

I met a gastroenterologist. He was tall, lean, sporting a permanent 5 o'clock shadow, and had the largest amount of articles published in medical journals among residents. This is a very big deal in our trade, because how else can you measure a doctor's ability? By how many patients they have cured? How fast they can perform an operation? Publications in journals is by no means equal to a doctor's ability, but at least it's something quantified, the way we need test scores.

When I met him he was a few years older than me, an avid Arsenal fan, whose secret dream was to find a job on ESPN where he could broadcast sports events. Unlike most physicians, he was not meticulous about details. He was smart with an air of nonchalance which made him very appealing. My feelings toward him was something between respect and a minor crush.

Dr. Arsenal told me I was attractive but too popular for him. "You have too many admirers," he said during dinner, and it was the first time I was told that it was a bad thing. He wanted someone who was sweet and quiet instead of a popstar.

A few months later he told me, "Do you know how many rumors I have heard about you? I know it isn't true, but people say you always pick the easiest team to work with."

"I work with whatever is assigned to me," I protested. I never picked anything.

"I know. And on your birthday, supposedly you received flowers, expensive watches, lots of free dinners, and someone even claimed he saw you with an old man. I don't look that old, do I?"

"I received nothing for my birthday." I felt cheated. Where's the watch I supposedly got? I could use one.

"Yeah, there are lots of rumors." We worked in a large medical center with 3000 hospital beds. It's a natural habitat for rumors. "Women are jealous of you. Men attack you when they can't get you. If you did something nice, they say it's because of your beauty. If you screwed up, you are a pretty face with no brains."

He shook his head. "You know what? When you work in a hospital, being beautiful is a really bad thing."

***

Dedicated to Glimpse for the set of gorgeous covers she made me. Thank you!