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that makes you happy.”
    Sweet Jesus.
     

     
    Dr. Edwards had warned me that the first time I was conscious during a débridement session would be painful beyond the ability of the morphine to alleviate, even with an increased dosage. But all I heard was “increased dosage,” and it brought a smile to my face, although no one could see it under the bandages.
    The extra dope started to take effect shortly before I was to be moved, and I was floating on a beautiful high when I heard Dr. Edwards’ clipped footsteps, from sensible shoes, coming at me from down the hall before she arrived.
    Dr. Edwards was, in every way, average looking. Neither pretty nor ugly, she could fix her face to look adequately pleasing but she rarely bothered. Her hair could have had more body if she’d brushed it out each morning, but she usually just pulled it back, perhaps out of practical concerns, as it is hardly advisable for loose strands to fall into burn wounds. She was slightly overweight and if one were to make a guess, it would be a good bet that at some point she’d simply grown tired of counting calories. She looked as if she had grown into her commonness and accepted it; or perhaps she’d decided that, since she was working among burn survivors, too much attention to her appearance might even be an insult.
    Dr. Edwards gestured to the orderly she’d brought with her, a ruddy chunk of a man whose muscles flexed when he reached out for me. Together, they transferred me from my bed to a stretcher. I squealed like a stuck pig, learning in a moment just how much my body had grown to accept its stillness.
    The burn unit is often the most distant wing of a hospital, because burn victims are so susceptible to infection that they must be kept away from other patients. More important, perhaps, is that the placement minimizes the chance of visitors stumbling across a Kentucky Fried Human. The débridement room, I could not help but notice, was in the farthest room of this farthest wing. By the time my session was finished, I realized this was so the other burn patients couldn’t hear the screams.
    The orderly laid me out on a slanted steel table where warm water, with medical agents added to balance my body chemistry, flowed across the slick surface. Dr. Edwards removed my bandages to expose the bloody pulp of my body. They echoed with flat thuds as she dropped them into a metal bucket. As she washed me, there was disgust in the down-turned edges of her mouth and unhappiness in her fingertips. The water flowing over me swirled pink. Then dark pink, light red, dark red. The murky water eddied around the little chunks of my flesh that looked like fish entrails on a cutting board.
    All this was but a prelude to the main event.
    Débridement is the ripping apart of a person, the cutting away of as much as can possibly be endured. Technically, it is removal of dead or contaminated tissue from a wound so that healthy skin may grow in its place. The word itself comes intact from the French noun
débridement,
which literally means “unbridling.” The etymology is easy to construct: the removal of contaminated tissue from the body—the removal of constricting matter—evokes the image of taking the bridle off a horse, as the bridle itself is a constriction. The débrided person shall be set free of the contaminant, as it were.
    So much of my skin was damaged that removing the putrefying tissue meant more or less scrubbing away everything. My blood squirted up onto Dr. Edwards, leaving streams of red across her gowned chest, as she used a razorlike apparatus to take the dermis off my body, not unlike the way a vegetable peeler removes the skin from food.
    Dr. Edwards made long—No, that’s too formal. Our situation made us more intimate than the cruelest of lovers, so why not use her given name?
Nan
made long swooping passes over my back. I could hear the blade as it slid along my body, disengaging the skin. The only way she’d know that