Obit.

 

original

Tonight, as I am paid to do every Tuesday night, I slide a 100X confocal microscope lens through a drop of oil on a thin glass slide. Despite my years of practice I still approach the eyepiece winking, though I advise my students to do otherwise. Open both eyes, I admonish, and save yourselves the strain. But maybe I just want to be the only girl in the room who for hours at a stretch can keep one eye in focus. Tonight, though, as my one eye successfully navigates the wasteland of pink toothpaste that is healthy brain tissue, I wonder about its origin. Whose is this slice of self? At this, my internal professor kicks into auto-response. Well, of course, he drones, it's the patient's. I interrupt: It's my patient's; I claim her because no one else does. I pick out the thin vessels fatally obscured by erythrocytic ring-stage Plasmodium falciparum (the deadliest sort of malaria) and I visualize my dead, human patient who probably had a family and used that prime pink real estate to construct real thoughts. Tonight I scan the only remaining physical evidence of her (his?) hypotheses and revelations, moral abstractions and predispositions, prejudices and secret loves. Does her family know she lives?--that part of her is in my eighth-floor lab? That an autopsy sample taken from someone who died without access to the saving expertise of tropical disease specialists somehow ended up in my cabinet, in my hands, in my eye?

In my lab are brightly labeled boxes. Within them I group each disease in numbered slots, and within each slot I keep one six-micron slice of the single most traumatic experience in a person's life. I can see what killed her; what crippled him; I can tag it on the slide and on next week's lab exam I can ask my students to tell me how those people died. Normally, my slides read like guesses in Clue--Leishmania donovani, in Bangladesh, with overwhelming hepatosplenomegaly--but tonight they are obituaries. I scan through with morbid fascination, then crumple up my interest and continue.