“For his discovery of the therapeutic value of leucotomy in certain psychoses”
In the sterile and orderly operating room, something was terribly out of place. Knives, forceps, clamps and drills were already at hand, glimmering of cleanliness in fluorescent white light – yet the surgeon himself was completely unprepared. Honestly, he was a complete mess, leaning over the surgical table and holding onto the soothing coldness of steel with his pale trembling fingers, which hardly gave any relief.
As soon as a nurse walked in, pushing a gurney with his little patient, and carefully laid him onto the operating table, his confidence, gained after a double-digit number of successful operations, vanished into the thin air filled with a sweet smell of halothane. The boy’s thin legs and arms made him look so frail in the cold white lights, sleeping soundly with morphine running through his veins and breathing superficially, as if he was caught up in one of his usual night terrors again. They were exactly what the surgeon pledged to cure, to cut out for good. He was well aware of all the sleepless nights this fragile child had to spend and every tear he cried this year, learning to live without his mother. In the face of such an unbearable pain, leucotomy, his award-winning discovery, was indeed the last resort.
With a habitual movement, the surgeon took the ice pick and punctured the boy’s eye socket to get to his brain. Apparently, that was less invasive than drilling directly through the frontal bone – his method was deemed innovative for a reason. When the instrument entered the soft brain tissue with a revolting sound of torn flesh, the surgeon made a sharp turn with his wrist and held his breath before the thalamic cut, which required extreme caution and precision. Skilful enough, not even once did he lose his patients, which he couldn’t say about other “medics”. If someone asked him, the boy was lucky not to end up in the hands of those butchers.
The last incision was perfectly clean, as well as catgut seams and white elastic bandages covering the boy’s head. The operation was a success… but the surgeon didn’t feel convinced, as he watched his patient slowly coming round after the narcosis, wrapped in an over-laundered thin blanket. The boy himself was just as pale when he opened his only intact eye to look around in utter bewilderment. “White, so much white,” thought the doctor anxiously and slowly approached the boy.
“How are you? Does that hurt, dear?” – his voice quivered uncontrollably.
A minute of silence seemed endless, as the boy was staring into the emptiness with a faint smile. Finally, the child warily asked: “Who are you?” – and the doctor’s heart sank.
“I am…” – your dad? A murderer? A stranger? Nothing seemed right, as his only son was now a blank canvas, no more than a shell of himself. – “I’m so sorry”.
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