It Ain’t Brain Surgery

By

Byron Edgington

Eleanor was far and away the most fascinating woman I’d ever encountered. Or at least the most fascinating one I’d met in a grocery aisle. That’s not quite right; I’d met her at a local chi-chi food retailer’s weekly wine tasting, a froo-froo affair where quasi snobs like me congregate every Friday night to sip the latest varietals, and nosh tidbits of exotic fare we don’t even like but can’t admit we don’t. We slog along, station to station in the cleverly decorated store that we know is ripping us off right and left, while snacking on our three ounce kale/kipper/kombo, or salmon russe puree or the latest foodie craze, Paleo diet arugula. In the back of our liberal minds hovers the sneaking suspicion that the very corporate maggots we abhor own controlling interest in the upscale market, but we suppress the thought and take another munch of watercress-tilapia salad. We knee-jerk lefties are a curious lot, our default mode full acceptance of everything and everybody, except for religious nuts and Republicans.

It was at station number three that Eleanor sidled up to me, fondling her English Midlands cracker layered with Russian monkfish. Lifting her left hand she saluted me with the wine offering, a dry yet aromatic, vine-ripened Cab from western Australia, on sale for a mere sixteen dollars the bottle. “Greetings,” she said. “You look like a fellow I dated in medical school, actually in my surgical residency.”

“Oh do I?” Charmed, I lifted my Australian Cab and chinked her glass, the same style and size as my own, supplied by the store as a reward for my five-dollar entry fee. “David Kern.” I shook her hand. “Not a medico, I’m afraid,” I said, the best retort I could offer between bites of crackered monkfish while slightly tipsy.

“Quite all right, Mister Kern,” she said. “I knew you weren’t my former colleague when you turned fully around. He had a lot less hair, and his, um, phrenology is different.”

“There’s a term I’ve not heard for a time. So you’re a phrenologist?”

“Neurosurgeon, actually. I practice in San Francisco, and have privileges in New York as well, at NYU. I’m applying here at Ohio State to work with Doctor Stanley Jenner, the new cryo-surge fellow.”

I chugged the last of my Cabernet and shuffled along to station number four while Eleanor—excuse me, Doctor Eleanor P. Frances, MD, FACS, she said, shuffled along beside me. “Cryo-surgery?” I said.

“Yes, Stan has my application, and I expect to be working with him soon.”

“Fascinating.”

So she’s on a first name basis with Stanley Jenner, amazing, I thought. We made our way through the crowd wearing their Crocs, Dockers and thousand dollar lockets. Station four featured a California Chardonnay advertised as ‘Full Bodied and Flavorful, with a Hint of Citrus.’ Snack fare resembled something Doctor Frances might encounter in her OR, a whitish-pink mass perched on a Pringle. I accepted the wine, but declined the appetizer.

“Not going to try the Rock Cornish hen pate’?” she sneered. “Where’s your sense of adventure? Life’s nothing without a good adventure.”

“I don’t consider ptomaine an adventure worth trying, thanks.”

“You’d never have made it last year where I was. Two weeks in Papua New Guinea eating with the natives. That was after a week in Tierra Del Fuego where they eat algae for breakfast. So you should at least try that.”

I winced at the good doctor’s disparaging appraisal of me, and tried to ignore it. “Looks like something you might have excised from a patient.”

She laughed, careful not to spill her Chardonnay and forked the savory snack. “The diagnosis in this case would likely be a colloidal cyst, or possibly a… You don’t want to know what it really looks like.” She made a face and dropped the Melba toast in a nearby trash receptacle.

            “So I was right not to ingest it?”

            She grinned. “The wine’s good.”

We rounded the back of the store, shoulder to shoulder with fussy, Gucci-clad shoppers and rowdy adolescent pre-teens wearing little horses and alligators on their three hundred dollar sweaters, as moms swept Irish butter, French cheeses and Tahitian papaya into their baskets.

            “So, what do you do?”

            I drained my Chardonnay and suppressed a belch. “English department here at OSU. Brit Lit. PhD in ’96. Tenured in ’98. Hope to give it up soon.” I handed my empty glass to the girl at station five, a waif wearing a dozen counterculture buttons and green hair, tonguing her lip ring as she poured the Peruvian Medoc. She took Eleanor’s glass, too and eyed each pour like the measurement was critical, like a brain surgeon wielding a scalpel. “There you guys go,” she chirped. I took the glass and chinked Eleanor’s again. “Where’d you go to school?”

            “Stanford,” she said, nipping her Medoc. “Undergrad there, then med school at NYU. I spent a semester at the Sorbonne, but got bored.”

“French food too tame?”

“No, the coursework wasn’t challenging enough, so I came back and did a cardiac residency at Michigan…”

“Must be the wine,” I said. “I thought you said neuro…”

“Now, it’s neuro, yes. Cardiac first. At Minnesota…I mean Michigan. Hated it. Too many whiners. So the classics, huh? What are you teaching?”

“Just finished a full semester of Conan Doyle. Never get tired of him. He had a way to make people believe anything. Ever read A Study in Scarlet?”

“Oh, yeah, I had that... Isn’t that the one with Little Nell, and the chimney sweep..?”

“That’s Dickens. Study in Scarlet introduced readers to Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson. Holmes tells Watson how all crimes lend themselves to solution by reasoned investigation. Like you neurosurgeons do, exploring all possibilities to arrive at a diagnosis.”

“Fascinating.”

“Not nearly as fascinating as what you see in your work, I’m sure. Must be almost terrifying cutting into a person’s brain the first time.”

“A bit intimidating, I have to say.”

We finished station five’s wine offering and gulped the bland dessert, raspberry custard that was advertised as sugar free and tasted like it. I invited Eleanor to grab a bite to eat, and we retired to the store’s plaza, where canopied tables invited leisurely conversation and relaxed chit-chat, the worthless exchange of useless data that passes for substantive dialogue these days: The fate of one fashion maven or another; Neanderthal Republicans; anti-gay morons; climate change and its simple solutions.

            I was intrigued by Eleanor’s career, but even more by her reticence to discuss it. Maybe she’s one of those who sees through the posturing and bravado and is comfortable in her own success, I thought. No need to talk about it; just let others figure out its intricacies and be impressed. Maybe she sees through all the hype and hypocrisy these days, the crying need of our kind to display our wares like so many bright, shiny items on shelves at chi-chi stores. Still, I wanted to hear what she did, and what it felt like and a few anecdotes from the operating room. I wanted to know her real story.

            “Tell me about the worst case you ever confronted.” I spread Grey Poupon on my pumpernickel, and then layered corned beef on top. “The one case that challenged you the most.”

            She stared into the parking lot. “I guess I could tell you about… There are a lot of challenging cases. I really can’t discuss… Hipaa rules, you know?”

            “Quite all right,” I said. “We all have a license to protect. So tell me, in general, what attracted you to...”

            She looked up from her kale and arugula salad. “…internal medicine?”

            “No…I thought you said neuro, didn’t you say..?”

            “Yes, yes, the first time, though, it was internal…then I tried cardiac and hated it, so yes, neurosurgery. Doctor Fleming, chief of surgery at San Francisco General convinced me. He watched me operate on old Mister Cliff… Like I said, Hipaa rules, sorry. So, how big are your classes?”

            “Not as big as they used to be. Since I received tenure, they’re almost one on one, so I enjoy it more, but, like I said, I look forward to retiring soon. Politics is killing the profession. But really, tell me what made you gravitate to neurosurgery, and brains. What convinced you to muck around inside people’s skulls and figure out what’s going on in there?”

            “Well… Here’s the thing, I just find brains fascinating.”

            “Yes? Go on.” The wine had its grips on me and I felt my eyelids drooping. “I hear there’s a new kind of science, a field called noetics where people study how we connect mentally with each other, like reading each others’ minds and there’s this mass interchange of ideas and feelings and sensitivities.” I stared at Doctor Frances, a glop of corned beef in my mouth waiting to be chewed.

            “Really? Uh…you know, I did hear something about that, a bunch of people who think they can read minds or something?”

            “Yep. You think that will intersect with neurosurgery? Maybe open up a whole new area of research?”

            “I can see how that might, yes. Fascinating.”

            “Yes, it is.” I chewed the corned beef, and sipped my lime-flavored soda water. “You still haven’t told me how you gravitated to brains.”

Eleanor leaned across the table and launched into a Wikipedia-like disquisition on the human brain. It was a dazzling performance. “Here’s the thing,” she said. “The adult human brain consists of two lobes of equal size packed against each other inside a round-ish bone roughly the size of a cantaloupe. It’s a whitish mass weighing ten pounds, give or take, and contains billions of nerve cells. Billions. Eons ago, when we humans evolved from protozoa, to multi-celled creatures, to pelagic, amphibious, terrestrial…” Her hand swept the table, the store, the entire outside world. “….we finally leapt from the trees and walked upright and the human brain has taken us all over the planet. In that time the brain has learned language, social interaction, metabolism, reproduction...” Her fingers tallied all the accomplishments. “The human brain reached its apex in the Cartesian brain/mind conclusion: ‘I think…”

“….therefore, I am,” I finished for her.

“That’s right. So, that’s why I wanted to get into it.”

 “The brain’s growth has been heady stuff.” I grinned, the wine talking.

Eleanor laughed. “That’s good. I see why they gave you tenure.”

            “Thank you. I work hard at what I do.”

“I’m sure.” She leaned in again. “No one really understands the human brain, and how it works and what goes wrong with it when the wires get crossed and it makes us do foolish things. We just go along with it, follow its orders and act like we’re enslaved to it. Like our brains tell us what to do and we do it.”

I nodded, in full agreement. She was one smart woman, like I said. Not the kind of woman one meets in a grocery aisle. I chugged lemon water again. “Here’s what amazes me. One would think that, after billions of years of evolutionary, territorial adaptation the brain would recognize such things as consistent activities that fail to match up with what the brain has processed in the past.”

“One would think,” she said.

“And brains do that to some extent, homing in on most behaviors that trigger a degree of skepticism. The key word there is ‘most behaviors,” I said. “Even after eons of evolutionary adaptation, the human brain is often fooled. As the saying goes, ‘it ain’t brain surgery.’

“I see why they gave you tenure.”

Eleanor left the store, disappearing into the crowd outside. I finished my water, collected trash from my meal and hers, careful to separate items into recycle/trash/discard, whatever that meant. Halfway home the familiar nagging started. I couldn’t get it out of my brain. “Cardiac? Neuro? Or did she say internal medicine?” I listened to NPR, leaving the radio on to hear the finale of the appropriately titled driveway story for the week. No surprise that it was a segment on noetics, and the growing field of human mental interchange. “Experiments by the Institute Of Noetic Sciences in Petaluma California point to our ability to share thoughts, feelings, fears and sensitivities across miles and oceans. Former NASA astronaut Edgar Mitchell founded the center. Doctor Mitchell says we all inhabit ‘….a universe of consciousness.’ For National Public Radio, this is…” I flipped the radio off. “Thank you, Ed Mitchell. I think you’re right; it isn’t brain surgery.”

It was seven P.M., so only four o’clock on the west coast. I kicked off my loafers, dropped two ice cubes in a tumbler and poured three fingers of Chivas Regal over them. The wheat brown liquid streamed over the ice, the swirling, umber brown sauce that would soon encircle my highly-evolved brain cells, soothing their restless energy. “Damn, why can’t I let these things go?” I plopped the glass on the marble counter with a clunk and switched on the iPad. “San Francisco General… Here it is. Department of…” A wicked frown spread across my face. “Jeez, cardiac surgery? Neuro? Internal medicine?” I picked the hospital operator’s number and started there.

The tinny speaker on my iPad squawked and a woman’s voice said, ‘…San Francisco General Hospital is this an emergency?”

“uh…no, I’m just calling to…”

“How may I direct your call?”

“I’m trying to reach a Doctor Eleanor Frances. I believe she’s a neurosurgery resident? Possibly cardiac?”

“Frances…one moment, please…”

Pages shuffle. Voices murmur. The woman’s huffy breathing hisses in the mouthpiece. “Sir, I have listed a Doctor Phillip Frazier, but I’m not seeing… Oh, wait one moment, there is a physician…Doctor Eleanor Frances, you said?”

“Yes, that’s the one.” I sipped the scotch. Maybe I had tracked her down.

“Um…it appears Doctor Frances has left the service, sir. You might try UCSF, they may be able to help you.”

“Okay, thank you, do you happen to have their..?”

“Have a good day, sir.” The line clicked off.

“You, too.” I put the scotch down, dialed the number for UCSF and heard a woman’s voice that could have been the others’ twin sister. “…an emergency..?”

“No, I’m looking for a Doctor Eleanor…” I explained my mission, the scotch luring me, ice melting, liquor swirling and shifting in the glass waiting to comfort my skeptical brain.

“….sorry, sir, there’s no…wait just a moment, there’s an old file for a Doctor Elaine Frambes, could that be..? That file’s from HR, and it appears Doctor Frambes’ application for employment was denied, sir. Is there something else I can help you with?”

“Guess not, thank you. Have a good day.” I tapped the iPad off and took a sip of Chivas. “Fascinating.”

My next call was to NYU Hospital, where the operator answered in standard Newyorican, in other words, nearly indecipherable English, but I managed to make out the gist of her response. “…ant no Dactah Franzizz heah, mistah, looks loik ya shud maybe cull, I dunno, maybe up ta noo Yawk hospital in Queens, an look fa her dere, ya know?” The line buzzed. “Yeah, maybe I shudd,” I muttered. “Or maybe Doctor Frances isn’t quite who she claims to be.” I took a long draught of scotch and felt the intoxicating brew seep into my cantaloupe-shaped, whitish, ten-pound mass. “Why can’t I let this go?” I dialed the hospital operator at Ohio State. The woman was evidently a triplet with two sisters in California, her familiar voice raising hackles on my arms. “….this an emergency?”

“No, it’s not. Could you direct me to Doctor Stanley Jenner’s service, please?”

“One moment.”

“This is Sheila, Doctor Jenner’s secretary, may I help you?”

“Uh, hi Sheila, you don’t know me, but…you recently interviewed a Doctor Frances, a Stanford graduate? Neurosurge resident? She’s being vetted to work with Doctor Jenner?”

“Um…Yes, I remember. Fascinating woman. What can I help you with, sir?”

I told her the whole story, including the discussion we’d had around the chi-chi table at the chi-chi store, about noetics and its mass consciousness and the evolution of the human brain. And I told her what my exploration had uncovered. It was straight out of Conan Doyle. “Just thought you’d like to know.”

“Um…yes, sir, I’ll be sure to pass this along to Doctor Jenner, we really appreciate this, sir. Thank you so much.” The line went dead. I finished my scotch and munched on a cracker smothered with West African tuna salad. I avoided the chi-chi store for several weeks.

Eleanor Frambes slammed the cab door so hard the hack yelled. “Hey, lady, a fuckin’ two dollar tip’s bad enough, you gotta tear up my cab, too?”

            “….not the day to give me grief, mister. Just go away.” She snagged the handle on her battered briefcase and raced toward Denney Hall and the English department. “Ruined my life, Kern, you son of a bitch!” Almost ripping the building’s door off its hinges, she barged inside, students scattering in her wake. “Where’s professor Kern’s office?”

            Two girls with piercings and matching blue hair ducked away from her. “Professor…who?”

“Kern! David Kern! Jesus, you kids these days…”

They skittered outside laughing at the crazed woman.

Eleanor slogged through the hallway looking at nameplates on doors. “Kern, you son of a bitch…”          

            A man in a tweed jacket stepped from his office. “May I help you?”

            “David Kern’s office,” she huffed. “Where can I find..?”

            “Kern? You’re sure he’s...?”

            “You’re a lot of help.” She stormed to the lobby where students hovered around clerks who were typing up class changes and course signups. “Where is Professor Kern’s office?”

            All heads swiveled her direction. A woman stood behind her desk. “No Professor Kern here,” she said. “This is the English department, you’re sure he’s not in..?”

            “Classics! Brit Lit, for god’s sake.” Her hand chopped the air between them. “David Kern. He specializes in Arthur Conan Doyle.”

            “I’m sorry, Miss, there’s…”

            “Professor David…”

            “….no one here by that name.”