Neck Iron

a description of a cyst excision

Neck Iron

 

 

 

         ‘If it isn’t one thing then it’s another,’ she says moving from the patient leaning her thin Olive Oil body and round face toward the computer to note the new problem. Dr. Taylor glides into the room, smiling behind a thin beard, and makes small talk as he feels the lump on the neck, gentle hands becoming strong as he touches the cloth of skin and then rolls it between his fingers. He diagnoses it a cebacious cyct, a hard, non-cancerous tumor and recommends it be excised. It will be cut on an operating table to barely lighten the body. As he leaves the room, the nurse reappears from the screen of a computer, with a doctor’s name, Eakins, and appointment time. She opens the observation room door, the air escaping, free, as a falconer might free some once-injured bird of prey. No feeling is such an anvil of love left behind as joy flies free.

         Dr. Eakins bends forward a little, stretching the skin to create tension, observing the cyct, declaring it infected with a need for antibiotics to cool it down. He says that once the medication is working he can excise the strange little tumor. He calls in a prescription that will prepare the skin for the healthy trauma, as the operation is arranged for t-minus ten days, and then the diagnosis is finished and a double person, doctor and nurse both leave the room in an ending couplet.

         Two hours before the operation, a nurse steps into the room, proferring the necessary hospital garments, blue as scrubs. They are clothes that tie in the back, along with slippers. They roll the wheelchair into the operating room straightening an odd skinny bed. The doctor puts down ironed starched and sterilized cloths, a lift-off apron, on skin and injects lidocaine. It is the fuel line to a liquid rocket, the anesthetic burrowing deep into the cyct and numbing the neck. He starts to cut roughly at the flesh material with a sharp scalpel, finally cutting away the tough flesh beneath the thin blanket of skin and pulling the cyct free. He says the word ‘cyct’ as calmly as a mission control announcer might claim ‘lift off,’ and the nurse reaches with a jar in hand to catch the marble of flesh, another anvil of feeling left behind, an act that shows the doctor understands the material of skin and any composition of that matter, porous at the atomic level to be manipulated carefully, and might absorb attention in the same way a launch pad might receive heat. The cyct is soon in a container on a double check for cancer, far away in the space capsule of a small sealed jar.  He uses sutures to close the open space, pulling the threads through tough ligaments under the flesh, iron earth material, so that he leaves a scar behind, a numbed starched collar, a neck iron.