Another Day in the Frontal Lobe Read Online Free Page A

that most people wouldn’t want to think of their neurosurgeon as having “fun” (or marveling over gelatinous goo). But you have to have some fun with your job, or why do it? As a junior resident, I was privy to an unusual conversation between one of the academic neurosurgeons and a woman with a newly discovered colloid cyst. The neurosurgeon explained that he was going to have to refer her to a colleague in the department who was more of a specialist in the endoscopic technique recently advocated to remove such cysts. He then added: “But don’t get me wrong…. I’d love to take that sucker out!” The woman appeared dumbfounded as the neurosurgeon patted her on the back and walked out, leaving us in the room together alone. An awkward silence lingered. Some things are better left unsaid.
    Cushing was buried at Lake View Cemetery, a historic cemetery in Cleveland that is also the final resting place of J. D. Rockefeller and former president James Garfield. When my husband and I were still medical students, we wandered around the cemetery in search of his grave. We found it only after consulting a cemetery map, as it wasn’t one of the most impressive tombstones. As eager medical students, we had become Cushing groupies, several decades too late.
    I can assure you that, as a kid, extracting a nail from someone’s head or wandering around a cemetery in search of a neurosurgeon’s tombstone were not activities I would have envisioned for my future. I was, though, privy to the world of surgery well before I made a single career move, and this must have affected the wiring of my brain in ways undetectable to my child mind at the time.

THREE
    Influences
    I grew up with surgical stories. My father is a surgeon—a general surgeon—and I understood from an early age that there was some degree of gore inherent in his job. This was a great source of pride for me as a kid. Most of my friends had fathers who sat at desks all day. What kinds of stories were there in that? I imagined my friends, helpless, subjected to lifeless desk-based tales at the dinner table. Lucky for them, though, I was happy to spread my wealth of secondhand tales from the trenches.
    The account of the poor kid with the hair bezoar became legendary. This was a child my dad took care of when he was a resident. The word “bezoar” is probably one of the ugliest words in the English language, and rightfully so. It refers to a wad of any given material that gets stuck in the stomach, often requiring surgical extraction. Typically, this wad collects slowly over time. The word “bezoar” is not used in everyday speech, which makes it all the more intriguing when used on the rare appropriate occasion, as with this story.
    The subject of this nonfiction was a boy whose grandfather, I believe, was a barber. The boy hung around the barbershop regularly, and supervision was apparently lax. Between customers, he had a peculiar habit of crawling around the perimeter of the room, picking up scraps of hair off the floor, and swallowing them. Over time (was it months, or years? I can’t remember now), this child developed a massive hair bezoar in his stomach, right under the unsuspecting noses of his family and friends. When things finally came to a head, with the boy having no room left for conventional nourishment, he required major surgery to extract the mass. When the family learned of the contents, they pieced together the chain of events with disturbing clarity.
    This bezoar had taken on the exact shape and size of the boy’s enlarged stomach and my father had the foresight to capture the image of the extracted hairball on a thirty-five-millimeter slide. Surgeons like to show each other pictures when they give lectures, partly for teaching purposes and partly as a thinly veiled version of the classic “here’s what I did on summer vacation” show-and-tell. In surgery, more often than we’d like to admit, anecdotes rule, and all the more powerfully when