In the recording, an eye surgeon in Dubai says most of the people he sees just want to drive at night again. Home along Sheikh Zayed Road, without the brake lights smearing across the windscreen.
His website says he has a special interest in phacoemulsification and complex anterior segment surgery.
It’s the same operation.
He’s a composite of doctors I’ve heard in recordings. I hear him a lot.
I read every paragraph I write for a doctor under my breath. Where I trip, something comes out. Sometimes it’s an acronym. Sometimes it’s a long word there for the sake of seriousness. When my breath runs out before the sentence does, the sentence gets cut in two. I call it the mumble test. If a doctor wouldn’t say a line out loud, it doesn’t belong on the page.
The page is in the third person. It still has to sound like him.
Open yours tonight and read it under your breath, the way you’d explain it to the woman across the desk.
The word you trip on is where she stopped reading.