In the Flesh, Out of Mind

A silent watch begins in Year One’s light,

Not like the hiss of vents in this sunny tomb,

Where I, a medical student,

lowest in the hierarchy of the operating theatre,

have stood for eight long hours,

And watched the clock eat up its hollow rounds.

My stomach, empty, tied in the air –

The scent of cauterisation and sterile shame.

They laid the landscape of a hip apart,

A canyon gouged in white: a raw, red map;

The nurses, interns, anaesthesiologists, deft and quiet as dawn,

Had set the stage before his staged entrance,

A theatre prepared for his theatrics.

He entered late, a god dressed in blue; who touched

The Steel, performed his ceremony, well-rehearsed,

Then patted bloodied shoulders, and was away.

I found him afterwards, with his cup of steam,

His name bold, already on the report–

A sovereign claim on work he barely grazed.

The patient awoke with grateful, clouded eyes,

And filled his bald head with praise.

And I, who held the truth upon my tongue,

Felt its cold weight, and let it turn to ash.

One truth buried in ash, another rendered into codes.

That ash became dust on shelves of fleshless files.

“Fleshless”, wondered I, “What is a life, merely datapoints?"

My sigh, lifted the ash, swiped it off, revealed the truth

My eyes, examined clinical records, under fluorescent glare,

His name in bold, theirs in coded script;

I skimmed through lines of youths my age.

A sixth, small, nascent star called “polydactyly”

Their struggles sketched in bureaucratic script:

“Inattentive and sleepy,” “suicidal tendencies,” “eats lunch alone.”

Most had the extra digit neatly shed,

A closed case. A solved equation.

But one note: "surgery refused repeatedly"

No surgical scar to mark a choice made clean.

Just life, unresolved; a tangled, living thread,

Condemned to a footnote, a reluctant code.

And in that line, a universe of pain –

Not of the flesh, but of the stubborn will,

The hope that's chipped, the trust that's worn away.

We carve the body, label the despair,

And in our spreadsheets, we make monsters “rare”.

The cadaver once taught me silence was a mercy,

A final dignity we had to keep.

But this new silence is a wound that weeps,

A complicity in systems cold and deep.

For every life we simplify and housekeep,

A part of our own spirit learns to sleep.

Now in Year Two, the silent watch has changed.

The bones make sense:

The CPC joint, the bifid phalanx, Wassel’s type –

Cold, flawless terms in categories, neat and wide.

But nowhere in this system, crisp and stark,

To graph the living shame, the daily sting,

Nowhere to feel the world’s stare turn a hand to stone.

This is the truth no textbook can atone:

That for the child who hides a sixth, small star,

We name the parts, but never speak the ache.

The science of the cure is dearly won,

But what of those who chose.

for their soul’s sake, Not to be solved?

“A polydactyly case unclosed”

Do we hold their fragile, tangled thread alone?