I had spent many nights in the emergency burn unit of the James Fillmore Hospital watching the victims of oil fires, exploded propane grills, swallowed drain cleaner and marveled at the intricate mosaics burnt into delicate skin. With my hands cupped around my face and pressed against a window, my eyes would fixate on a patient sedated and posed like an angel with white wings of hospital sheets falling lifelessly over the bed’s handrails.

I would watch the convoluted art of the surgeon as he prepared his canvas with a 6-0-suture size Polypropylene scalpel removing melted cotton from blistering flesh. I would watch as he secured his masterpiece with a 38mm facil point epidural needle and empty the contents of Fenatyl 2 ug/kg balanced with Desflurane and infused with Propofol to induce amnesia and frame his work to the easel of a hospital bed.

It was there in the dimly lit hallways permeated with the sterile smell of antiseptics that an amorous infliction surmounted my entire being. I studied the craft of debridement, the careful removing of clothing that has been melted to a patient’s skin, and I was rapt to the small, delicate incisions and the graceful maneuvers of the surgeon/artist’s hand.

Nurses flowed like water through the unit pushing carts of surgical blades. An alluring array of stainless steel, nickel-plated carbon steel, and aluminum rested softly on a sterile polyester blue cloth. When attentions were drawn to an incoming patient, a ripened and fallen angel, I would slip an instrument into my pocket. Cartilage knives, Colin scalpels, microdissection blades, angled dissection scissors, deflagration spoons, section lifters, T-type dissecting pins, Hubber probes. After obtaining a common blue silk scrub, I began to sneak into the operating room and blend in with the medical students observing re-creation first-hand.

After one particularly large allograph of a patient’s chest and abdomen, burnt when the patient, lying in the sun after applying a light glaze of tanning oil, lit a cigarette, I lifted the patient onto a gurney and as he was wheeled down the hallway to Outpatient Burn Care and the doctor was cleaning his instruments, I unlocked the wheels of the operating table and rolled it out into the staging area, then the reception area, left into Hallway F, past the positive pressure isolation room, right on Hallway C, around the newly installed state-of-the-art hydrotherapy facility, then into Elevator B, down to the lobby, and right out the front door to my car.