Con su flor en la boca and my 10 blade in his trachea

Gala Theater's "Blood Wedding" was such a fun trip back to halcyon days of minoring in la bella lengua. You absolutely cannot accuse Federico of ever having been too subtle, what with Leonardo riding his great big sweating horse hither and yon in search of stolen moments with La Novia, while the chilly Luna keens about how she wishes she were able to warm her hands in the hot blood of a human heart, and Gala didn't try to minimize any of the fantasy in the interests of realism. The flamenco trio who performed in the first half almost overshadowed the rest of the production—bring back the guitarist! more stamping!—but were balanced out by a great arrangement of the woodcutters' song in the second act, where three peripheral characters sing a lament to the moon, asking her to leave some shadows where the lovers can hide. She doesn't. It ends badly.

Continuing the cantata in the key of goooooore, this week's mini-med course was on non-cardiac thoracic surgery. I've always heard that surgeons are the fighter pilots of the medical world, all ego and strut and absolutely bugger-all in terms of personal skills, and mostly I haven't been able to argue. This week's presenter clearly loved, oh but I mean LOVED, her job, but she was also weirdly charismatic (and gorgeous and raising twins on her own and a fine arts grad and able to do plumbing work on her 1865 house during her residency and oh God I've wasted my life). She explained how open-chest surgery became possible with the development of the ventilator, then she kind of took a sharp left turn and from then on we were all sitting in stunned silence as she ran us through at least five different major operations, including tracheal reductions, bronchial lobectomies, arterial reconstructions, esophageal reconstructions, and tumor excisions, complete with CT scans (which she made comprehensible, a neat trick), graphic photos, a couple of videos. I especially liked one video—an esophageal operation, maybe—where she could clearly be heard snapping, "I don't care, I don't care." She looked a bit embarrassed and said, "I only care about important things when I'm doing surgery." Other memorable lines included, "The aorta is tough, like kevlar. The pulmonary artery, though, it's like American cheese. Rips if you look at it," and of course, "Wow, I wish I could go on Letterman for this one. I can sever a trachea at the neck, extract it from below, and reach up to wave at you through the hiatal space." Surgeon humor.

The biggest surprise for me personally was that I could watch the slides at all. Blood and lymph and exposed innards, no thanks, usually, but she had the gift of showing all the squishy bits as structures. I was fascinated by the engineering of certain neat surgical tricks, like how to remove a giant tumor during a laparoscopic operation: You detach it from the surrounding structures, put it in a ziplocky bag inside the body cavity, then snip the mass into bits, seal the bag, and ooze the whole thing out like a sausage. How sneaky! How clever! How I hope I never need that myself! And oh sweet God that teratoma is going to eat my dreams. She wrapped up with a look at the seriously dire fall in the number of cardiothoracic fellows; it's one of the few specialties that's experiencing negative growth, and part of the problem is the hours and the difficulty of training people in such potentially serious areas. She's working with the med students to use her ingenious plaster/bovine/banana-prophylactic models to introduce basic surgeries, but since they won't be fully grown surgeons for 10 (!) more years, there are going to be some very lean years. We may've come out of the class starry-eyed and thinking that surgery looks like, OMG, super fun, but I doubt anyone really wants me trying to figure out how to use a rib spreader.