HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT ABOUT NOT BEING A NEUROSURGEON?

It’s absurd that I apprenticed and studied for my entire youth to help others live longer so that they can continue to melt the polar ice caps while enjoying party subs. Still, I am rather fond of my rongeurs, my retractors. After a while, everything becomes routine. My favorite part is when we’re offered up sheep corpses to test prototype drill bits.

Unless you’re Saint Teresa and have taken holy orders, you feel the despair of the clinician, particularly when working with children. Suturing peach fuzz or reopening a bone flap to drain the cerebrospinal sap of a girl with brain swelling leaves a bittersweet existential aftertaste. I sobbed in a supply closet, the first real, gulping sob since I was an intern, after I accidentally nicked the sinus of a toddler with epilepsy and saw the blood drenching my scrubs down to my shoe covers. “I’m trapped,” I remember muttering, and not merely because I was huddling in a locked supply closet. There’s a dissociation from yourself, similar to what patients report feeling upon that first tug of anesthesia. When I was removing a pituitary recently, I had the thought, What if I abandoned my sons and simply worked at the food court in an airport?

HOW ARE YOU GOING TO MOVE ON WITH YOUR LIFE?

After I took out that pituitary, I found myself driving to the mall. Both of my sons had after-school vandalism and weren’t going to be home until late. Escalators that were past the point of caring about anything, a feeling I identified with, stitched me up several floors in a department store until I arrived in the blissful sauna of fabrics that was the section for evening gowns. An emerald-green dress covered in sequins with a plunging neckline was the first to flash to my brittle attention, and I looped it over an arm raw from surgical soap. In the changing room, as I was determining, “My boobs probably cannot handle this,” a female voice, perfectly pitched in helpfulness, had to inquire, “How are you doing in there?” When I opened the door, she fluttered into an excited clap and said, “It looks so great on you! Really brings out the color of your eyes.” I told her my eyes are brown. “Of course,” she recovered immediately, “but I can see ocher, almost amber flecks in them when you’re wearing that dress.” Did I want her to gather up some others that I might like better? She resembled my mother, who had raised me by herself and been so proud of my reliable profession and my reliable husband, who had worked odd jobs to support us—she had been a waitress and a secretary and a stockist of blue jeans—but forty years younger, reincarnated and karmically forced to work retail for eternity. Though maybe that was my dumb imagination too sentimental from bereavement.

The twenty-something reincarnation of my mother brought me a strapless golden dress of stiff satin that curved like a bell but with a slice cut out of it at the front, as if my legs were the clapper on display. “Absolutely not,” I said. She brought me a dress that was layers of frothy raspberry tulle. “I’m the human embodiment of a smoothie.” She brought me a duchesse-silk bustier dress that was hand-beaded with pearls and lacy corsages that looked like crumpled baby fists. “They don’t look like the hands of ghost babies to you?” She brought me a classic black sheath dress with a slinky train that shimmered royal neon blue, so it felt as though I were nearly constantly tripping on an electric eel. “Is this for a special occasion?” she asked. Such information might give her a clearer idea of the best ensemble for my needs. “It’s for the Medulloblastoma Ball,” I replied. “Is that a new start-up?” A variety of brain tumor, I explained. There was no Medulloblastoma Ball; I had invented it on the spot, and the fake event conjured pictures of globular brain tumors in formal wear awkwardly holding each other at the waists during a slow dance in a junior high gymnasium.