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Winnipeg Free Press - ONLINE EDITION

Surgeon brilliantly uses scalpel on herself

By: Staff Writer

Posted: 04/12/2009 2:58 PM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

Direct Red
A Surgeon’s View of Her Life-or-Death Profession
By Gabriel Weston
Doubleday Canada, 192 pages, $30

Reviewed by Jessica Woolford
If Gabriel Weston wields her scalpel as confidently and precisely as she does her pen, she is a masterful surgeon indeed.
In this, her first book and memoir, Weston takes on sex, death and more in 14 linked and riveting essays.
Weston read English at Edinburgh University and might have gone on in the field but for a chance meeting with a surgeon.
Watching him operate, she feels "a sense of wonder and excitement and exhilaration" and sets her heart on a career in medicine. Not yet 40, Weston is now a part-time ear, nose and throat specialist and a member of the Royal College of Surgeons.
"Direct red" is a dye used to stain tissues for closer observation and it is one of a litany Weston repeats to herself whenever the operating room’s aura makes her queasy.
"What to do when you feel unwell," she observes, "is never discussed, but it is my private belief that all surgeons have these moments of incapacity, and that we each try to save ourselves differently."
While Weston provides ample gory details of failed and triumphant surgeries alike, her book is also a haunting and ultimately hopeful account of her journey to self-understanding, acceptance and preservation.
During her training, Weston’s initially exalted view of herself and her capacities collides with her limitations. Her eagerness for "surgical action," combined with the sense that her seniors expect her to avoid "that worst of faults, sentiment," and instead cultivate "the disdain of the fully and excellently unfeeling surgeon," clouds her judgment.
Admitting "I have not always done the right thing," Weston writes with candour of her failings, including her treatment of Mrs. Mbele, whose hemorrhoids were "the size of a peach."
Though she knew that "the kind thing to do would be to admit this poor woman" and that "there was a good chance she would need a hemorrhoidectomy," Weston instead gave her pain killers, shoved the tender mass back inside her, and referred her to a general surgeon. Weston recalls Mbele’s pain as "a lacuna, an unrecognized event."
Weston also neglects to recognize the underlying pain of Ben, a lonely young boy who is in hospital complaining of headaches.
She increases his dose of morphine and stumbles off to bed only to learn later that Ben has died from an undiagnosed brain tumour.
She reflects that although she knew he was suffering, it wasn’t until having her own children that she understood "that what Ben needed from me that night was to give him whatever small amount of my heart’s warmth I could afford…. And he was unable to find this comfort in me."
It is another child who prompts Weston to consider her own pain. Caring for sweet baby Thomas, Weston begins to wonder, "Did I seem all doctor? Would it be impossible to envisage me elsewhere than this makeshift hospital home, doing this clinical caring? Was this in fact all I could imagine for myself? Was this all I was?"
Until her encounter with Thomas, Weston had followed a colleague’s chilling advice to "find a good nanny. Let the nanny bond with the children. You get on with your surgery." Her own baby, she writes, "seemed a distant sort of witness."
Weston’s response is to embrace her own "smallness" so that she can strive to practise not only "surgery at its moral best," but home life as well.
Weston’s language is elegant, her images powerful, her references to art and literature effective. But her memoir is outstanding because it bears witness to the human capacity to honestly interrogate and learn from the past.

Jessica Woolford is a Winnipeg writer who fears blood, needles and the odour of hospitals.

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