Nothing to Fix

The man lay on the table. I held the Richardson retractor as my partner shoved laparotomy pad after laparotomy pad above, then below, the man’s liver, his spleen, his pelvis, packing all four quadrants of his abdomen to staunch any bleeding from the self-inflicted gunshot wound.  

I relaxed on the retractor and looked at the patient’s vital signs on the monitor, waiting for the anesthesiologist’s eyes to appear less worried over his mask. After a unit of blood was in and another was started, the anesthesiologist nodded. I repositioned my retractor, and my partner slowly removed the lap pads. Every single one was clean—no blood, no bile, no stool. The bullet had miraculously tracked around the stomach, the colon, multiple loops of the small intestine, and stopped millimeters from the aorta.  

I blinked. The dread that we would find something irreparable vanished. The excitement that we would find something to fix, to save his life when he had wanted to erase it, evaporated. Annoyance, then guilt, crept into my mind. But I did not feel guilty for feeling annoyed.  

Thirty minutes earlier, when my duty phone rang, I had been trimming my infant daughter’s fingernails. The blood at the tip of her first finger had come fast; the flimsy nail bent, and I re-grasped too much tissue in the clippers. I tasted her blood in a quick kiss, then passed her off, crying, to my husband.  

I had left her for this.  

The tip of her finger will grow back. And the nails, too. And she will forget this nail cutting, will trust me to hold her fingers close to the clippers, to remove the sharp bits again. But I will always remember.   

Krista Puttler served in the US Navy as a general surgeon and has been fortunate to call many places home, including the Philippines, Guam, Hawaii, Japan, a stateroom on an aircraft carrier, and Norfolk, Virginia. She currently lives just outside of Naples, Italy. Her writing has appeared in Collateral, Cagibi, the Wrath-Bearing Tree, and HeartWood, among others. Please feel free to email her at kmp152doc@gmail.com.    

This essay first appeared in the Readers’ Notes section of Ruminate #63/64 (2022).