To this day, my eyes shine with childlike curiosity whenever I visit the surgical-instrument room at my old hospital. There, cleaned tools, packed individually, sit side by side in metal cages. They come in all geometric shapes. Some are straight, others are curved, and still others break in the middle at right angles. Some are round, some are linear, and one, an abdominal stapler, comes in the shape of a trapezoid. The odd shapes give off the aura of modern art or exceptional jewelry, and whenever I see them, I feel as if I had entered an exhibition. Indeed, it is hard for me to resist the urge to take one of the instruments out of its sterile package, touch it with my hands, and play with it.
Yet as an anesthesiologist, sometimes the room also makes me sad. The sense of sadness probably comes from the incompleteness of medicine’s conquest of disease. What are these instruments? Not the porcelain basins and blunt wooden probes of yesteryear; nevertheless, there are still scissors, scalpels, saws, and drills. Everything in the room causes a person pain, attesting to the primitive nature of existence. The room always hovers on the brink between the primeval and civilization, and however enticing the steel instruments may be to look at, however brightly they may reflect the overhead fluorescent lights, still civilization cannot claim the ultimate victory. Life still hurts because of the things in this room.
A philosopher might seem out of place here, as if a pink flamingo had suddenly strayed into an old English garden. But other than the hospital’s psychiatric wing, where doctors sometimes touch on philosophy to explain mental illness, the instrument room is probably the most logical place in a hospital for a philosopher to be. Philosophy’s focus tends to be arcane, and words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality. But philosophy has much to say about pain, which is an anesthesiologist’s chief concern. Philosophy has not only corroborated my own experience managing pain, but it has also influenced some of my clinical decisions.
Surgical patients hate pain, but sometimes they need to feel it. They wake up too slowly from general anesthesia and forget to breathe. Shouting fails to rouse them. Putting an alcohol swab under their noses is equally useless. All I can do is knead my knuckles into their sternums to stimulate them. But when they open their eyes in pain and start breathing again, those same eyes express total hatred for me. It is the paradox of pain: We come to life through pain, yet we hate pain.