My Mexican Surgery

    

      The lump on my shin had grown and was the source of a little pain when touched above its resting place. I thought,, or hoped it was a bunch resulting from a hit my shin took from a hockey puck years before. Winter in Maine was a time for playing pickup games on a frozen lake,, of course without pads or shin guards. I was however in Mexico now. My wife accompanied me to visit Doctor Mendoza (his nickname is Pato or duck) for a quick consultation. This was my first doctor experience in Latin America. My wife and Pato exchanged familiarities. Tenancingo is a large small town and everybody seems to know one another. We entered his consultation room. The doctor gave the suspect lump couple of quick touches. It was rapidly concluded that excision and biopsy would be best for me. At once I was suspended by the legs as if just born all over again. The term biopsy and the speed of diagnosis gave me pause. I was unsure, probobly a result of the new landscape, skeptical, and a little shocked,,,like a sudden sweat on the brow or that emotion that wells up and heaves your heart into your throat with a near miss while driving,,,,a reflexive offensive move from a jangling of nerve endings.
      I was to come June 5 for the excision, a las ocho (8:00). I went alone that morn and was ushered into an operating room with another youth who had a bunch on his breast also to be excised that day. My wife was to arrive later. We sat on opposite beds in silence, north and south a wall of language separating us both, yet we shared the same concerns. We were very concious of one another within our artificial bubble of inattention.
     I studied the room to break the loud uncomfortable silence. There was a Daliesque crucifixtion, a amateurish painting of a modern Jesus suspended in the sky. They love to suspend Jesus here. On a tupperware type cart laden with medical instruments was a picture of Philadelphia, an old spot of blood stood out on the white wall, and the door was streaked with white lines. The sound of a mother giving birth drifted in from another room, a single groan followed by the sound of a baby crying with the violence of entering the world. I thought to myself how quiet the mother was during this process.
     I wanted to bridge the gulf of silence in the room. I asked my self-concious partner what was his problem.I only understood the word conflict but I nodded with assent in order to preserve the fragile connection of this non dialogue. At least the room now contained something spoken, something human. Even if he talked and I pretended to understand and vice versa, the words would alleviate fears,,, that pestered the room like having honey on your fingers when you are asked to pass a paper napkin. Yet after the brief interchange silence again thickened the air.
     The doctor came in with Lila the nurse who is also the doctor's sister. After a greeting and a peek at my lump the doctor indicated that he would nullify the area with an anesthetic. He inserted the needle then injected, and re-inserted at another angle and another all about the lump. He told me to tell him if I had pain and then began to cut. I couldn't or wouldn't look not willing to witness my own dissection. There was appeal albeit even existential, in this.
     The nurse and the doctor began talking about the World Cup and Mexico's upcoming game with Ecuador. Sometimes their detachment relaxed me because I suspected that what they were seeing could not be so serious or they would not be so matter of fact. Snip, cliiip, criiip, the sound of cutting hard flesh filled the room. Some of the slashes I felt in that dull anesthesized way, and other criips no, but it was the sound that lingered like an unsure aftertaste.
     Finally came the sutures and the instructions and my wife's invitation to the chamber. Because I am white the doctor told her I have need of an antibiotic. The "dark ones" he said have stronger anti-bodies. I felt, for a moment, as if I were on the receiving end of bigotry. However it seemed sensibly true that after a lifetime of consumption through skin and mouth in these less antiseptic surroundings one would have more tolerance, let us say for drinking from a roadside ditch. Really I never trusted all those handcleaners and room sterilizers and antibiotics in food up north that rid the world of the unseen enemies that lie in wait to seep into our fragile bloodstreams and wreak havoc (hacer estragos).  There was a need to place our internal blubbers in Germanic order.
     The lump turned out to be a calcium deposit. It was brought in for me to see from a backroom floating in a jar of clear preservative. It looked like something from the cleaning of fish with miniscule balls and flag like streamers that fell from the core. The operation cost $90.00 U.S.D..
     The doctor had operated on the young boy with a bunch right after me. I was recuperating when they entered with his excision in a bigger jar swimming lazily in fluid. It resembled the gizzard of a turkey only lighter in color.  His was much larger than mine, like a fleshy egg with long spangles.
     One week later, while on a ladder painting a wall, I had an accident. I was trying to move the ladder while at the top by jumping a little. In a flash I found myself on the floor when the ladder slipped. The surgery opened up when my shin hit one of the rungs. 
     I didn't return to the clinic for new stitches. After a few days it had healed over. Perhaps the white guy had earned some new antibodies himself.