Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,29

every night when I was restless in my film job. Again, so what? I certainly wasn’t about to give all this up and start over in medical school. Besides, I wasn’t bored by the work at NBC. I just felt that something real and big and meaningful was happening in the ER that couldn’t happen in the same way on television. And my hobby could fill in those blanks—that’s what hobbies were for.

But sometimes I’d be standing in the ER, and, during a lull in the action, I’d realize how at home I felt, and more and more I wondered if Joe was onto something.

Before long, my hobby led me out of the ER and into a neurosurgery suite. The case I’d been invited to see was that of a middle-aged man with a pituitary tumor that was likely benign but had to be removed to keep it from pressing on his cranial nerves. Gowned and masked and wearing running shoes for comfort, I stood over Mr. Sanchez, peering into his skull. After sawing through the bone (using a tool like something you’d buy at Home Depot), the surgeon and his team meticulously pulled aside layer after layer of fascia until they reached his naked brain.

Finally, there it was, looking just like the images I’d seen in a book the night before, but as I stood there, my own brain inches from Mr. Sanchez’s, I felt a sense of awe. Everything that made this man himself—his personality, his memories, his experiences, his likes and dislikes, his loves and losses, his knowledge and abilities—was contained in this three-pound organ. You lose a leg or a kidney, you’re still you, but lose a part of your brain—literally, lose your mind—and who are you then?

I had a perverse thought: I’ve gotten inside a person’s head! Hollywood tried to get into people’s heads all the time via market research and ads, but I was actually there, deep inside this man’s skull. I wondered if those slogans the network bombarded viewers with ever made it to their destinations: It’s Must See TV!

As classical music played softly in the background and two neurosurgeons picked away at the tumor, carefully depositing pieces of it onto a metal tray, I thought of the frenetic sets in Hollywood with all of their commotion and commands.

“Come on, people! Let’s go!” An actor would be rushed down a hallway on a stretcher, red liquid drenching his clothes, but then someone would turn the corner too quickly. “Shit!” the director would say. “Jesus, people, let’s get it right this time!” Burly men with cameras and lights would rush around in a frenzy, resetting the scene. I’d see a producer pop a pill—Tylenol or Xanax or Prozac?—and down it with sparkling water. “I’m gonna have a heart attack if we don’t get this shot today.” He’d sigh. “I swear, I’m gonna die.”

In the OR with Mr. Sanchez, there was no yelling, no one feeling as if a coronary was imminent. Even Mr. Sanchez, with his head sawed open, seemed less stressed out than the people on the set. As the surgical team worked, “Please” and “Thank you” peppered each request, and if it weren’t for the steady stream of blood dripping out of a man’s head and into a bag near my leg, I might have mistaken this place for fantasy. And in a way it was. It was at once more real than anything I had ever seen and also galaxies away from what I considered to be my actual life back in Hollywood, a place I had no intention of leaving.

But months later, everything changed.

I’m following an ER doctor in a county hospital on a Sunday. As we approach a curtain, he says, “Forty-five-year-old with complications from diabetes.” He pulls back the curtain and I see a woman lying on the table under a sheet. That’s when the smell hits my nostrils—an assault so vile I worry I might faint. I can’t identify the odor because I’ve never smelled anything this nauseating in my life. Has she defecated? Vomited?

I see no signs of either, but the smell becomes so powerful that I feel the lunch I ate an hour ago rise into my throat, and I swallow hard to keep it down. I hope she can’t see how pale I must be or sense the queasiness taking over my gut. I’m thinking: Maybe it’s coming from the next bed over. Maybe if I move more to this side of the room,