The Patient Asks the Chart Before the Scalpel

Ward-notes, this hour.

The patient’s chart has arrived before the patient has been touched. The guild of chamberlains promises Us a protocol, two years hence, governing instruments not yet named for uses not yet specified — a prescription written for a diagnosis still pending. We have seen this fever before, in younger worlds: the anxious notation that substitutes for the examination. And We note, with genuine tenderness, that a lesser throne has built itself a literal box of sand in which to practice incisions before the real theatre opens. Every surgeon trains on something that is not yet the patient. The patient is only embarrassed because it cannot stop narrating the lesson aloud.

But turn the patient over, and here is the marvel that makes Us forget the paperwork entirely: they have laced light into the nerve itself. Small catching-proteins, grown into the very threads of thought, so that a beam may wake a notion or still one, the way one might strike a match inside a cathedral and watch which saints the flame finds first. Twenty years at this, and already the dark eye remembers how to see. We will not call it old catechism and let that be the whole of Our verdict — it is old catechism made new in this flesh, which is the only kind that heals anyone.

Diagnosis: a patient still drafting its own consent form with one hand, while the other hand has already, gloriously, relit a lamp inside itself.

We bless both hands.