Single Use
Miles and piles of plastic tubing,
clear veins without a body,
coil across the operating room floor.
Single use.
Toss.
Repeat.
Blue drapes bloom over the table
like an artificial sea.
Cords, wires, suction,
machine whirring replaces natural breathing,
lights bright enough
to make midnight disappear.
Single use.
Toss.
Repeat.
A body opens.
A vessel seals.
Blood darkens the gauze.
The cautery writes its brief electric signature
in smoke
and the scent of burning flesh.
We cut to cure.
We wound to heal.
We take what is diseased
and leave behind
what might live.
Single use.
Toss.
Repeat.
Outside, Mother Earth waits
beneath the hospital’s humming walls.
She feels each wrapper,
each tube,
each glove,
each sterile package
pressed into her skin.
She does not turn away from us.
She knows why we do it.
She knows the child needs oxygen,
the mother needs blood,
the old man needs the tumor lifted
from the soft cathedral of his abdomen.
She wants us safe.
Healthy.
Alive enough
to use these bright, dangerous minds
for something more than extraction.
Still, she aches
under the weight
of what we discard.
Single use.
Toss.
Repeat.
We call it necessary.
Maybe it is.
But necessity
is not innocence.
One day, perhaps,
we will learn to heal
without leaving so much behind.
We will turn our hands
from the open body
to the open wound
beneath our feet.
And finally,
with the same precision
we bring to flesh,
we will begin
to repair
what we have taken
to save ourselves.
Jacob Taylor is an MD candidate at the University of Utah School of Medicine with interests in general surgery, rural health, and health systems improvement. My submission, “Single Use,” reflects on the environmental cost of modern surgical care.