The Wound That Wouldn’t Close
The bottle was half-empty, and so was he.
Drinking alone. Music playing low in the background. He’d been ghosted. His girlfriend had vanished into thin air, no explanation, no goodbye. Just gone.
“Do you know what that means? Ghosted?”
The other person at the bar understood all too well. She’d been ghosted too. She disappeared. But he couldn’t wrap his head around it. When did this become something people did to each other? When did disappearing without a word become acceptable?
He blamed the internet. People screamed at their friends and family on Facebook in ways they’d never dare across a dinner table. They became rude. Insensitive. Insensitive — that was the word. And then he gave up trying to find it. Forget it.
“You’re way better than her.”
The music swelled. He took another drink. It was cool. Time to go back to bed. Don’t judge him.
She wouldn’t heal right. That much was clear.
Eventually the wound would close. It would close. But it would be ugly. Painful. Probably worse than it was before. Months of recovery. She wouldn’t be able to travel. But it would close. They’d use mesh. It would take time, but the hole in her abdomen would finally seal shut.
And now she had a functioning… battle?
He was mad at himself. He knew he was wrong to try what he’d attempted. Overconfident. That was the problem. He’d pushed too far, believed too much in his own hands.
“I’m also mad at medicine.”
Fair enough.
But when he took it out on the wall — when his fist met drywall and left a crater — the response was swift and sharp.
“You did a terrible job patching that. You can see the whole entire outlet.”
The joke landed through the frustration. Stop peeking at it before they had to replace the whole damn thing.
Alex.
That was it. That was the moment.
Meredith — not until everyone got here.
“Who’s everyone?”
Dr. Altman’s text had said it all. An abdominal wall transplant. She wanted to do an abdominal wall transplant on Megan Hunt. Harvest the skin, the musculature, the fascia — everything — from a donor. The surgery had been done three times before. Twice successfully. But both of those had involved a simultaneous small bowel transplant.
This was different. Easier, in a way, because they’d already prepared the bed. And she would use a bone graft to limit the risk of rejection.
Every time they tried to fix this thing, it got worse. Every patch, every repair, every desperate attempt to close what wouldn’t stay closed — the wound grew, the tissue failed, the body rejected their best efforts. But this. This was something new. Something radical. Something that had never been attempted quite this way before.
The room fell quiet as the weight of her proposal settled over them.
An abdominal wall transplant. A full-thickness replacement. Skin, muscle, and connective tissue from a dead stranger, grafted onto a woman who had been through more surgeries than anyone should endure. It was audacious. It was dangerous. It was possibly the only thing left to try.
And somewhere in the back of the room, a hand still ached from punching drywall, and a bottle sat half-empty, and two people who had been ghosted by love were about to throw themselves into the hardest kind of surgery there is — the kind where hope is the only thing holding the patient together, and even hope had cracks running through it like old plaster.
The question wasn’t whether they could do it.
The question was whether they should.
Because some wounds, once opened, have a way of swallowing everything you throw at them. And some surgeons, once burned, have a way of reaching into the fire anyway — because the alternative is watching someone die while you stand there with your hands in your pockets, wondering if you could have done more.