gorgeous as it gets." Usually the women she operates on are a good hundred pounds heavier than Phillips, and slicing through all the flab is a nuisance. How much nicer to work by the best of the books.
|
Yet there is blood, blood, blood, and they must sop it up and sop it up and cauterize what they can. Finally they are inside the abdominal cavity. Clamps hold apart the layers of Hope. Her viscera look healthy and sprightly. They sparkle. Hope has become a living museum, open to the world. Thus it is a shock to hear her murmuring behind the curtain. After all, she is not unconscious, but merely in a state of calm, coming in and out of a nap; the epidural is what's doing all the numbing. She talks groggily to the anesthesiologist, and he reassures her that things are going fine. Horbach reaches into the cavity and palpates the various parts, the bladder, the kidneys, the gallbladder, the stomach, checking for abnormalities of any kind. Once you're in there, why not cop a few feels? "We occasionally find something more complicated than what we went in for," Horbach explains.
|
Not in this case, though: it's textbook anatomy. Horbach points out the ovaries to me. They are each about the size of a large strawberry, and they are smoke-colored and bumpy. They look like moist seedpods. On one is a noticeable white cyst, the probable spot of Phillips's last ovulation, when a ripe egg burst through the follicle and left behind a fluid-filled pocket that is still healing. Horbach also indicates the fallopian tubes, or oviducts, which are attached to the uterus. The tubes are exquisite, soft and rosy and slim as pens, tipped like a feather duster with a bell of fronds, called fimbriae. Gabriel Falloppius, the sixteenth-century anatomist after whom the structures were named, thought that the oviducts looked like trumpets and that they served to expel "noxious fumes" from the uterus. To me they look like sea anemones, flowers of flesh, the petals throbbing to the cadence of blood.
|
This particular hysterectomy will be a relatively conservative one, Horbach says. She is going to leave the oviducts and the ovaries in place. That doesn't always happen. Often surgeons take out the complete reproductive kit at once, uterus, cervix, tubes, and ovaries, snip, snip, snip. They reason that if a woman is near menopause, the system is about to retire anyway, so why leave things possibly to become cancerous later on? Beware the seedpods! Ovarian cancer is deadly, the line goes, and it's usually silent until the disease has progressed beyond
|
|