接下来的几个小时，天下太平，一切顺利。梅丽莎在休息室睡着了。我努力辨认加西亚病历上那些难以辨认的潦草字迹，跟读天书似的。我最终还是看明白了，她全名叫艾琳娜·加西亚，这是第二次怀孕，没有做产前保健，也没有医疗保险。我写下她正在服的药，提醒自己待会儿要去查一下。我在医生休息室找到一本课本，了解了一点早产的知识。早产儿如果活了下来，还是有很大概率会遭遇脑溢血和脑瘫。不过，三十年前，我哥哥苏曼早产八周，现在已经正式成为一名神经内科医师了。我走到护士身边，请她教我看显示器上那些弯弯曲曲的图像。在我眼里，这跟医生写在病历上的字一样难以辨认，但显然可以预测接下来是平安无事还是大难临头。她点点头，开始指导我看宫缩数据和胎儿心跳对宫缩做出的反应：“这边，仔细看看，就能看到——”
For the next several hours, things progressed smoothly. Melissa slept in the lounge. I tried decoding the indecipherable scribbles in Garcia’s chart, which was like reading hieroglyphics, and came away with the knowledge that her first name was Elena, this was her second pregnancy, she had received no prenatal care, and she had no insurance. I wrote down the names of the drugs she was getting and made a note to look them up later. I read a little about premature labor in a textbook I found in the doctors’ lounge. Preemies, if they survived, apparently incurred high rates of brain hemorrhages and cerebral palsy. Then again, my older brother, Suman, had been born almost eight weeks premature, three decades earlier, and he was now a practicing neurologist. I walked over to the nurse and asked her to teach me how to read those little squiggles on the monitor, which were no clearer to me than the doctors’ handwriting but could apparently foretell calm or disaster. She nodded and began talking me through reading a contraction and the fetal hearts’ reaction to it, the way, if you looked closely, you could see—
她停下来，神情非常忧虑，一言不发地站起来，冲进艾琳娜的病房，然后又冲出来，抓起电话，呼叫了梅丽莎。一分钟后，梅丽莎赶到了，睡眼惺忪地看了一眼图表，也冲进了病房。我急匆匆地跟在她后面。她打开翻盖手机，给主治医生打电话，连珠炮似的说着各种术语，我只能听懂一部分，也大概了解了情况：双胞胎情况很危险，唯一能保住的办法，就是紧急剖腹产。
She stopped. Worry flashed across her face. Without a word, she got up and ran into Elena’s room, then burst back out, grabbed the phone, and paged Melissa. A minute later, Melissa arrived, blearyeyed, glanced at the strips, and rushed into the patient’s room, with me trailing behind. She flipped open her cellphone and called the attending, rapidly talking in a jargon I only partially understood. The twins were in distress, I gathered, and their only shot at survival was an emergency C-section.
我不由自主地跟着一大群心急火燎的人进了手术室。他们让艾琳娜仰卧在手术台上，药物注入她的血管。一个护士手忙脚乱地往她隆起的腹部抹了抗菌溶液，主治医生、住院医生和我用酒精冲洗了手和前臂。我模仿着他们迅速的动作，默默地听着他们低声咒骂。麻醉师给病人插管，而主刀的主治医生则烦躁不安。
I was carried along with the commotion into the operating room. They got Elena supine on the table, drugs running into her veins. A nurse frantically painted the woman’s swollen abdomen with an antiseptic solution, while the attending, the resident, and I splashed alcohol cleanser on our hands and forearms. I mimicked their urgent strokes, standing silently as they cursed under their breath. The anesthesiologists intubated the patient while the senior surgeon, the attending, fidgeted.
“快点，”他说，“我们时间不多，动作要更快！”
“C’mon,” he said. “We don’t have a lot of time. We need to move faster!”
我站在主治医生旁边，看他用手术刀划开那女人的肚子，在她的肚脐下面留下一道弯弯曲曲的长切口，就在她那隆起的子宫顶端的下面。我努力跟上每一个步骤，迅速在脑子里搜索课本上的解剖示意图。手术刀所到之处，皮开肉绽。医生满怀信心地切开韧性很足、包裹着肌肉的白色腹直肌筋膜，接着用双手掰开筋膜和下面的肌肉，甜瓜一样的子宫开始出现在视野里。他把子宫也割开，一张小小的脸蛋出现了，接着又被淹没在血泊中。医生伸手进去，拉出一个，又拉出另一个。两个婴儿浑身发紫，几乎一动不动，双目紧闭，像过早掉出窝的小鸟。他们的皮肤是半透明的，能看到下面的骨头，似乎不是两个真正的孩子，更像谁信笔画的素描。他们太小了，比医生的手大不了多少，抱都抱不住，立刻被交给在一边待命的新生儿重症监护医生，迅速进了新生儿重症监护室。
I was standing next to the attending as he sliced open the woman’s belly, making a single long curvilinear incision beneath her belly button, just below the apex of her protuberant womb. I tried to follow every movement, digging in my brain for textbook anatomical sketches. The skin slid apart at the scalpel’s touch. He sliced confi-dently through the tough white rectus fascia covering the muscle, then split the fascia and the underlying muscle with his hands, revealing the first glimpse of the melon-like uterus. He sliced that open as well, and a small face appeared, then disappeared amid the blood. In plunged the doctor’s hands, pulling out one, then two purple babies, barely moving, eyes fused shut, like tiny birds fallen too soon from a nest. With their bones visible through translucent skin, they looked more like the preparatory sketches of children than children themselves. Too small to cradle, not much bigger than the surgeon’s hands, they were rapidly passed to the waiting neonatal intensivists, who rushed them to the neonatal ICU.
燃眉之急算是解决了，手术的步调慢了下来，大家都趋于平静，没刚才那么混乱了。电刀烧灼切口，止住了小规模喷溅的鲜血，皮肉烧焦的味道缓缓飘散开来。子宫缝合，缝起来的伤口如同一排牙齿，咬合在一起。
With the immediate danger averted, the pace of the operation slowed, frenzy turning to something resembling calm. The odor of burnt flesh wafted up as the cautery arrested little spurts of blood. The uterus was sutured back together, the stitches like a row of teeth, biting closed the open wound.
“教授，腹膜需要闭合吗？”梅丽莎说，“我最近读到资料说不用闭合。”
“Professor, do you want the peritoneum closed?” Melissa asked. “I read recently that it doesn’t need to be.”
“上帝造物时闭合的，不要人为去分开，”主治医生说，“至少只能暂时分开。我喜欢把东西恢复到原来的样子——我们还是把它缝合了吧。”
“Let no man put asunder what God has joined,” the attending said. “At least, no more than temporarily. I like to leave things the way I found them—let’s sew it back up.”
腹膜是包覆腹腔的一层薄膜。不知道为什么，我完全错过了刚才腹膜被切开的过程，现在也完全找不到它在哪里。在我眼里，这伤口就是一大堆杂乱无章的组织，然而在外科医生看来，这一切都是井然有序的，如同雕塑家看一块未经雕琢的大理石。
The peritoneum is a membrane that surrounds the abdominal cavity. Somehow I had completely missed its opening, and I couldn’t see it at all now. To me, the wound looked like a mass of disorganized tissue, yet to the surgeons it had an appreciable order, like a block of marble to a sculptor.
梅丽莎要了腹膜缝线，把钳子伸进伤口，扯出肌肉和组织之间一层透明的组织。突然间，腹膜和上面的大洞就这样清晰地展现在我的眼前。她缝合了腹膜，继续处理肌肉和筋膜，把它们用一根粗针和套环缝法缝合起来。主治医生走了。最后，皮肤也做了缝合处理。梅丽莎问我想不想来缝最后两针。我颤抖着双手，将针穿过皮下组织。拉紧缝线时，我看到针有微微的弯曲。皮肤被扯到一边，一团脂肪挤了出来。
Melissa called for the peritoneal stitch, reached her forceps into the wound, and pulled up a transparent layer of tissue between the muscle and the uterus. Suddenly the peritoneum, and the gaping hole in it, was clear. She sewed it closed and moved on to the muscle and fascia, putting them back together with a large needle and a few big looping stitches. The attending left, and finally, the skin was sutured together. Melissa asked me if I wanted to place the last two stitches. My hands shook as I passed the needle through the subcutaneous tissue. As I tightened down the suture, I saw that the needle was slightly bent. The skin had come together lopsided, a glob of fat poking through.
梅丽莎叹了口气。“不平整，”她说，“你弄到皮层了——看到这条薄薄的白色东西没？”
Melissa sighed. “That’s uneven,” she said. “You have to just catch the dermal layer—you see this thin white stripe?”
