I used to be a surgeon, you know. Not that you can tell anymore, not with these shaking hands. The first thing I got told when I was in medical school was that no human body is like the textbooks. Flipped hearts, inch thick skulls, surprise tumours - not one single patient I worked on was anything like those neat little diagrams they make you study.
What got to me though, what had me handing in my resignation before the end of my shift was meant to be a simple lum removal. Just a benign tumour in their mid back, not too near the spine and not too big either. Whoever did the initial scans must have fudged them to hide what was really going on in that poor man.
When I went to make the initial incision, it moved. Just writhed in place for a second and slowly began to travel towards the lower back, heading right for the spine. I knew that if it got there it could do irreparable damage and we'd risk losing the patient altogether.
If it wasn't for our anesthesiologist shooting the damn thing with a sizeable amount of morphine we might never have stood a chance at removing it. I didn't even know what I was removing, not even when it was writhing about on a little metal tray.
I just know that it had pale green eyes that were squinting, trying to focus and unable to from the morphine and seeing light for the first time in its life. It took an hour to die and we never told the patient what we'd found. The official note was a parasitic twin.
Watching the life fade from those tiny eyes, from that tennis ball sized tumour, it broke me.
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