Another Day in the Frontal Lobe Read Online Free Page B

accompanied by high-quality Kodachromes. Surgeons know that in giving a lecture, it is also important to include the results of scientific, controlled, multicenter studies. The accompanying charts and graphs, though, tend to be either confusing or boring, so color pictures of things removed from patients’ bodies are snuck in whenever even remotely justifiable.
    As I grew older, it dawned on me that the story of Bezoar Boy was more pitiful than captivating. The case falls into a psychiatric disorder known as “pica,” or the involuntary urge to eat nonfood items. I was recently reminded of this child when I read a short news clip about an elderly man in France with a penchant for eating coins. Over several years, his stomach became so stretched out and weighted down with coins that it descended into his pelvis. During surgery, upon opening the precariously thin-walled, flimsy organ, the surgeons noted disintegrating francs at the bottom and—logically—euros layered at the top. This detail takes the cake and rivals anything I could possibly tell you about the aforementioned hair bezoar. The case is equally pitiful, though, and I feel a bit guilty in exploiting the old man as a supporting anecdote.
    My father, in telling his clinical accounts, was always respectful. The patients remained anonymous. He told the stories with a sense of wonder, not mockery. As a kid, I felt privileged to have such insight into the extremes of human behavior. I sometimes thought about his patient who swallowed a pen in jail, just so that he could leave his cell for the hospital, only to do it again upon his return. Talk about pitiful. My father reflected on the inmate’s state of mind, shaking his head in disbelief, and this story became my definition of human desperation.
    Looking back, there was another hint of my father’s dignity as a human being, more clear to me now as an adult: he forbade me from going to the so-called freak shows at the summer county fairs in Ohio. We lived in Shaker Heights, a nice suburb of Cleveland, and we visited these rural fairs to gain an appreciation of a different scenery and culture, and for the greasy funnel cakes with powdered sugar. Although there were plenty of other things to see—livestock, choice vegetable specimens, Amish buggies in the parking lot—I always begged my parents to let me go through the Hall of Human Wonders. At the time, I didn’t understand what was wrong with paying money to see the world’s fattest woman, or the wolf man with excessive facial hair, or the rubber man (who I now know probably had a serious, and potentially life-threatening, connective tissue disorder). Although my father was willing to divulge the true story of Bezoar Boy in the privacy of our dining room, he drew the line at paying to gawk at unfortunate oddities.
    My younger sister Ingrid didn’t share my interest in gawking. I attributed this to her relative discomfort with human deformity as a youngster. We frequented a Chinese restaurant at a strip mall where one of the waiters was missing a hand, and she never ate much there. I, on the other hand, reached for seconds while marveling at his ability to balance plates with the aid of his stump.
    Although I’m sure my father included plenty of uplifting stories in the dinner table mix—the archetypal ones about medicine and miracles, about patients with hope defying the odds—my child’s brain filed away only the more graphic and disturbing ones, in permanent storage.
    Apart from my access to gory stories, I took pride in my surgeon-father for another reason: he could handle anything. When it came to the threat of backyard injuries, I perceived my friends to be at greater risk of delayed or inadequate treatment, given their fathers’ narrow desk-based skill sets. I wondered if that made them nervous. What could their fathers do, aside from applying a Band-Aid? I knew that my dad, on the other hand, could always perform emergency surgery if he absolutely