Creative Writing Award - 2014
Class of 2016
About Tamanna Rahman
Tamanna Rahman ’16 earned a bachelor’s degree in American studies from Williams College in 2007 with concentrations in international studies and Africana studies. She spent several years working as a community and labor organizer, in Baltimore, New York, West Virginia and Bangladesh, before returning home to LA to work in community mental health. She is a certified psychiatric rehabilitation provider and will graduate as a psychiatric-mental health nurse practitioner.
Flesh and Bone
On a Tuesday morning last November, I watched a woman have her breasts cut off. After seeing a double mastectomy, there is really no other way to put it. There is nothing subtle about this procedure, no gentleness to it at all. It is brutal and matter of fact. There are no elaborate preparations as I had imagined there might be. The patient is masked, draped, and within moments, a thin clean line of blood appears as the scalpel arcs through skin.
The transformation is rapid. A breast relieved of its elastic sheath: it holds its shape, sways as a solid mass. It sits upright in its plastic container, nipple standing erect. Witnessing this mutilation, I am struck by its severity. The cancerous nodes the surgeons remove are tiny compared to the handfuls of flesh that must go with them. In the aftermath, empty flaps of skin remain.
It is sobering to know that our own cells could participate in such mutiny. That they might refuse orders at will, giving in to that base, beautiful desire for survival at all costs. What a triumph it must feel to arrive at the moment of your predetermined death, and somehow come out of it reeling with life. From there, there is no turning back. And so we find entire colonies of cells run riot, tumorous, malignant, invading. Our bodies are capable of countless forms of betrayal.
* * *
During my first clinical rotation, I learn that my own body will be the fundamental tool of nursing. I will heave and push, rolling patients in their beds. I will scan my eyes from head to toe, inspecting every inch. I will lay my hands on damaged limbs, understanding that touch is the ultimate comfort the nurse can offer. Before anything else, I learn to give a bed bath. Carefully removing a johnny coat, I smooth warm soap on a stranger’s skin. The angry ex-Marine with a fresh amputation, the chatty suburban mother of two, all grow quiet during this intimate transaction. An older woman holds my gaze as I finish washing her face, and quietly thanks me.
It is not only the surface of bodies, theirs or ours, that we claim as the medium of our craft. Breathing deep, I allow their smells into my lungs, searching for must, for saccharine ketones on the breath, the distinctive stench of C. diff diarrhea. Setting stethoscope to skin, I sink through waves of sound. Clumsily searching, I still my own breath, shut out my sight, and for a few moments, allow myself to become more other than I am self. No lab report or medical device could substitute for the immediacy of this. I fall in love with the physicality of this labor.
* * *
The operating room, then, is only an extension of these interventions we’ve accepted as routine. Yet it is qualitatively different. Where the nurse’s familiarity with the body creates a singular intimacy, surgery requires distance. The patient is reduced to a square patch of flesh, face and body draped with sterile cloth. I am actually startled when I notice the rhythmic rise and fall of her chest as I lean in closer to see; I had forgotten a person lay beneath. I wonder if surgeons cover faces this way to focus on the task at hand, like the cadavers we peer into in the lab. How difficult would it be to cut into someone, rather than a surface? I remember the first time I darted a needle into an arm, and how my hands shook.
What remains with me now, many months removed, is a memory of the woman’s face just before she went to sleep. Those were her last few moments in the body she had always lived in. In a few hours, she would wake with a new anatomy, raw and unfamiliar. She stared silently at the lights and monitors above her, waiting. As I watched, the surgeon took her hand, and stroked her face as a mother might. Even after the woman slept, the surgeon held her hand. She tucked a few loose strands of hair tenderly beneath the patient’s cap, before turning briskly to her scalpels.