The Doctor, I |
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By his second year of medical school, Jay Mautner knew that he wanted to specialize in plastic surgery. His outlook on medicine was basically holistic: he saw the responsibility of the physician not in treating this or that specific illness, but in working to achieve the maximum well-being of the physical/psychological whole of his patient. Given this outlook, it was clear to him that combating an anxiety caused by a difference between psychological perception of self and the reality of physical appearance is no less important to the wellbeing of the patient than combating diseases caused by germs or viruses. A crooked or jutting chin, breasts too large or too small, or a nose which felt “too Jewish” could harm a person just as dangerously as a malfunctioning liver or spleen.
This conviction was strengthened after Jay graduated from medical school and began practice. As he moved from residency in a large medical center to work in a private clinic, he gravitated to those areas of plastic surgery where, he felt. he could do the most in turning a person’s psychological outlook and physical body into one harmonic unity. Ultimately, he ended up working in a clinic that specialized in people with gender dysphoria, first doing facial and breast surgery, and later doing sexual reassignment surgery as well.
Dr. Mautner was good, very good! When he later left to start his own clinic, he built it around the philosophy of treating the person as a whole. Patients were extensively interviewed by resident psychologists to find out exactly what their self-image was, and how they expected to be perceived when the surgery was over, and a personal psychological counselor guided the patient throughout the entire process and for months after the surgery had been completed. The treatment was much longer and more involved than at other clinics (and, one must admit, more expensive as well), but the results were amazing. You may enter treatment looking like Rocky Balboa, but if you wished to leave looking and feeling like Marilyn Monroe, Jay Mautner would be capable of bringing you as close to that ideal as was humanly possible. It was never a question of just creating a new pair of breasts or a new vagina. It was always one of creating a new physical incarnation of the woman who had heretofore lived only in hopes and dreams.
Dr. Maunter never married and had few friends, and devoted all of his waking hours to his work. His greatest pleasure was spending long hours at his desk, reviewing patients’ files, analyzing the accumulated data, and planning exactly what to do. His “aha moments” were as satisfying to him as those of a research scientist who has made a great breakthrough, or an engineer who managed to find a solution to a seemingly intractable problem. He was as proud of his results as an artist is of his paintings or a poet is of his odes. When there were failures, he would ponder them deeply, trying to understand what went wrong. Often, he would offer to do corrective surgery for free, rather than be satisfied with a less-than-perfect result.
What social life Dr. Mautner did have was mostly with former patients, who would come back to see him and tell him how well they were doing, something that he definitely encouraged. His “alumnae”, as he liked to refer to them, would sometimes even invite him to their weddings and later to the christening or bar-mitzvas of their adopted children. He liked to take former patients to dinner at expensive restaurants (with their husbands or boyfriends, if possible), as though showing them off to the world — this is what I can do.
In truth, Dr. Mautner often envied his patients for the lives which, on the whole, were often fuller and more rewarding than his. Sometimes he would fantasize what those lives were like, trying to think of how alumna Molly was managing with her brood of five children or how alumna Jennifer was working out at her job as an airline flight attendant. Some of them almost obsessed him: the former high-tech executive whom he transformed into a waitress at Hooters, the lonely and unloved student who now ran a bridal shop, the former construction worker who was now a seamstress. Their dreams came true, or as close to true as it was possible to make them. How lucky they were. At night, alone in his bed, he would sometimes wish that there were a fairy godmother who could appear and make his dreams come true, who could do unto him and he did unto the others.
He rarely took more than a week’s vacation per year. However, after 15 years of heading his own clinic, which now included almost a dozen surgeons, Dr. Mautner suddenly announced that he was taking a sabbatical year, purportedly for contemplation and for writing a book based on his experiences, which would summarize his medical philosophy. He left the clinic in charge of one of his protégés, and gave specific instructions not to be contacted except in an absolute emergency. He then headed off … nobody knew precisely where.
As the sabbatical year ended, however, his secretary received an e-mail asking that the following message be put on the clinic’s website:
DR. JAYNE MAUTNER WILL BE RETURNING FROM SABBATICAL NEXT WEEK. SHE WILL BEGIN ACCEPTING PATIENTS ON THE FIRST OF THE MONTH.
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