asked him his birthdate–answered successfully, crucially for informed consent–and asked if he was prepared. On seeing a nod, she forced a tiny guide tube past the skin and into the liver. She stood by the puncture and waited sixty seconds to check that it wasn’t bleeding.
Satisfied, the pathologist turned around and told the terminal to begin scanning. The machine obeyed. It pulled the patient’s body through, scanning at every step, so that it could transform hundreds of 2D X-ray cuts into a 3D picture, and an ugly one. Dark spots illustrated uncompacted or fatty tissues–like cancer. Dark reached from his kidneys to his stomach, lurking around where fat shouldn’t.
The scan also showed one guide tube, glowing from reflected radiation, stuck exactly where needed. I set out fixatives, needles, and microscope slides on a sterile cloth-covered table. The pathologist raised something which the structure of a more sinister glue gun. She attached a long “needle”. When activated, it would rotate and press against another metal piece, like circular scissors. Mumbles spilled out of her surgical mask and asked the patient if he was ready. On confirmation, she slid the needle down its guide tube, pulled the trigger–a fleshy snip–and extracted it. I offered a slide; she released the sample. I ground it between two slides, separating its dense cells for easy examination, and put both in fixative bottles. Usually, I would slide any stringy remnants into a separate storage bottle. Today, the patient’s liver had fallen apart completely, like wet, red sand.
Each step was repeated twice, without change or signs of hope. At last, the pathologist ran the scan again; the darkness hadn’t moved from its squatting spots on his prime, internal real estate.