New Horizons

My patient sat still before me as I used the needle driver to wiggle my curved suture needle through his flesh to close the cut I’d made just moments before with a dull kitchen knife. Now you before you wonder just what kind of bizarre torture ritual I was completing let me assure you that my patient was in no pain - for he was only an orange.

One of the benefits of living on the campus where my sister teaches is the fact that I am welcome to sit in on any class that I’d like. So when a missionary doctor from Georgetown arrived to teach a class on suturing I decided to broaden my horizons.

Sitting in class with the sticky orange in one hand and the needle drivers in the other I carefully sutured in and out of the orange flesh. After learning the horizontal and vertical mattresses, the simple interrupted suture, the figure eight, and the sub-cuticular suture which completed in the flesh below the skin, I decided that the social work profession should defiantly include suturing. But since that’s highly unlikely that any social work giants will ever concur with that thought I guess I will have to satisfy myself with suturing fruit.