Lost and Found
by Anne Germanacos
Medical Museum
That summer, the children decided they wanted to open a medical museum. They were bored with the idea of camp, and a lemonade stand wouldn't bring in nearly enough money to buy the canoe they coveted. So they provoked small injuries, performed minor surgeries that yielded tiny parts of their bodies. It's for the sake of our museum, Mom, they told me, and I wondered where they’d learned such altruism.
Antony offered the toenail off the big toe on his left foot. It was black by the time it fell off. Mounted on white typewriter paper, it looked properly gruesome. Sal’s blood, drops of which, after a few days, added up to a slight liquid wave, were stored in a vial the children must have found at the dump. Some of the neighborhood kids made offerings as well. Millie gave a rat's nest of gold hair, Sam had a pile of skin shavings from the bottom of his foot. I'm certain one of the Cohen twins had sneezed the gloppy yellow gel smeared onto that red-and-white-checked handkerchief. And little Annie, hardly talking, understood and dragged her brother's filthy, stinking cast to the museum-- as if what had contained the wounded could be displayed as well. But a cast is not a true body part, even if it once held the sick part in a posture of healing. After she’d worked so hard to lug it from the garage, my sons rejected her offering. Ashamed of their treatment of a small child, I made them call the whole thing off. But Mom, they whined, what about the canoe? They decided to sell off their old toys instead, and eventually had enough cash to purchase the smooth-curved boat.
That was nearly twelve summers ago; the boys were ten and six. They've forgotten all about those early efforts at marketing something shocking, and I'd rather not remind them. But if they’d thought to open another medical museum, this summer would have filled it with an interesting array of specimens ranging from the pus that flowed from Sal’s ingrown toenail to Antony’s infected appendix and the skin Sal shed as he itched away at poison oak. But that’s only the beginning: What about their father’s broken foot? The witheredness of it when the cast came away. Their grandmother’s lymph nodes. Her cancerous cells on a slide beneath the lens.
Appendectomy
There was a great deal of fuss as to whether the surgeon would make three small incisions or one longer cut. The patient, reclining on his emergency room cot, played with the possibilities, juggled them, hardly able to imagine his insides, but focused like a beam of mirrored light on the end result, the scar. He wanted unmarred skin, everlasting beauty, eternal youth. Meanwhile, his white blood cell count was up and the surgeon wanted to go in with a long straight slice.
Half-dopey, he wasn't up to the rigors of her logic. She said she liked pulling back the layers of skin, muscle, and fat, so that the appendix was fully exposed. She was wise enough to refrain from telling the overwrought patient that she wouldn’t actually be performing the surgery, but rather directing a resident.
He lay back on the gurney, frowning a little for their benefit. Acting took his mind off the fear of the knife going into his body. He’d never had a knife go into him and couldn’t imagine how he’d stay calm and asleep with a sharp blade slicing his flesh. But, as he’d learn, there were inventions a person could hardly imagine.
Slices
Their son lay prone in a bed with sides. A surgeon was going to cut into his skin and take out the sick part. In their life as a family, they were always taking slices—some willed, others not—exposing parts of one another that would have been better left unseen.
They waited in an overlit hallway, while someone else cut through their adult son’s skin to see what could be found in the secret pocket of his flesh.
Post-Op Conversations
After the surgery, he spoke as if from a dream. The subjects were daily, practical: “I don't want to buy that blue shirt.” “Are we going to the movies tonight or not?” They listened only half-attentively, afraid he'd reveal some secret they didn't want to know.
Conversations with the Dentist
She thought she could do it forever: baby the tooth and chew on the other side, where the teeth were healthy, dependable. But the jaw kept going astray, clenching oddly and then striking just at the most sensitive part. There was nothing she could do but listen to the song of her pain.
In the dentist’s chair, one has such a vivid desire to speak. Words boomerang, unable to escape the drippy hollow of mouth.
Eventually, she made an appointment with the endodontist, a Chinese-American woman with an imperial-style haircut. Fluffed on top, it made her look almost heroic. She performed the operation with great speed and precision; the demise of the tooth’s nerves was exquisite.
Near home, someone had written Fuck Teeth on a once-wet block of cement. Now, every time she passed, she continued a lively conversation with the anonymous writer.
His Cast
All through the house, there were tiny pieces of lace. A little like the manna described in the Bible—she didn't venture to eat it. Eventually, she discovered that it was her husband’s cast. He’d been clomping around in it for almost three weeks-- the lacy bits fell more regularly as time passed.
At the doctor's that Saturday morning, the thing came away like two pieces of an egg. She watched him look down at his foot. It feels like an appendix, he said, numb and hardly my own. He couldn't touch his own leg without jumping. The dark hairs were impossibly gnarled; the skin looked gray. He couldn't like it.
At home, he watched two soccer games, back to back, the men's short thick legs taking them effortlessly across the green expanse. Then, he was nostalgic for the hard white cast, wished he’d brought it home in a plastic bag.
Lost and Found
What was lost that summer? An appendix, the root of part of a toenail, a tooth’s four-forked nerve, a wallet, a cake recipe, several pairs of glasses—dark and light, a swimming mask (prescription lenses), several layers of skin, an old friendship, eighteen lymph nodes, part of a breast, keys (multiple times).
What did they have instead? Cookies, smooth skin, a porcelain tooth, a neat, thin scar, a long, jagged one. Keys. A new wallet. Glasses, dark and light.