Clever Magazine, Summer 2010 " Ant Hospital " (www.clevermag.com)

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The Ant Hospital

by Zaphra Reskakis

As I look back, I realize that my career in the healing arts had its roots in my eighth year. In 1940 my best friend Electra and I had established our first managed care facility in Oakland, Pennsylvania. n our HMO. on the green wooden porch of my house on Camp Street, we had no need for referrals from the primary care physician. After we scrubbed with ivory soap and water from the garden hose, we solemnly stood gowned and masked in white nurses' uniforms , that were bedroom curtains in a previous life.

The garden gave us a large rostrum of patients. Beetles and water bugs had a hard carapace which our scalpels could not penetrate and flying insects were difficult to recruit and contain. We treated only brown or black ants and refused to minister to the red ants who unappreciatively bit us.

The operating room theater was immaculate. The wicker table was draped with a clean white sheet. A small, white, cotton-filled jewelry box served as both gurney and operating table. The pre -op antiseptic was a small bottle filled with water and the pink dregs of a discarded mercurochrome bottle. It stood companionably in a clean white shoe box with the bottles of yellow, green, and blue colored water.

The anesthesia administration set was made up of a rust-free piece of discarded window screen and a thimble with moistened cotton. The set was in a small white box together with the surgical set, which contained a small snub-nosed scissors, a popsicle stick scalpel, shaved twig probes, a small needle, black thread, and a nearly depleted roll of both adhesive tape and gauze. To the right of the operating theater, on another table, was the waiting room for the ant relatives. Here, where we consoled the luckier ants, we had supplied tiny teacups filled with water and tiny dishes filled with cracker crumbs.

Since none of our male friends would participate in our "Ant Hospital", the patients had no real doctor. It never occurred to us Greek girls that we could be doctors, no less surgeons. Perhaps if we had assumed the role of surgeon, we would have realized that the appendectomies we were doing required a technique other than the corpectomies we were actually performing. We should have realized that the ants were not the dolls of our student nursing days. As we operated on our hapless patients, we realized that no suturing, glue, or paste could rectify our unintended, unorthodox surgery. Repeatedly, we proved truth to the saying that surgeons bury their mistakes. Our mortality rate was 100%, but we gained invaluable experience in bereavement counseling and burial procedures. Discouraged by the high mortality rate, we closed our health care facility within a week of its inception.