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- Take one soulful, loyal best friend: Spot, the family dog, a mostly Beagle mutt with black and brown spotted white fur, a twinkle of compassionate wisdom in her big, beseeching eyes, and espresso bean-colored, long silky ears, and put her in a basement.
- Set out on a ping-pong table amongst neatly stacked records and baseball and ice hockey equipment on a surgical pad in following order: two sterile gowns, three sterile masks, three pairs of sterile gloves, intubation equipment, IV catheter, anesthetic medication, surgical knives, retractors, and a bottle of Betadine.
- Mix in one workaholic, successful, alexithymic, urologist father, the son of an immigrant farmer from Biella, in the Piedmonte area of Italy.
- Add one vivacious, fecund mother. The oldest daughter of twelve children, a nurturer of her siblings without a childhood, pregnant with an unplanned fourth child that she desires but her husband is ambivalent about.
- Fold in three children all under the age of ten. Have the ten-year-old son (future heroin addict and then reformed social worker) be blood-phobic and want desperately to have NOTHING to do with this Grand Guignol event.
- Mix in the eight-year-old daughter with a tough facade but a hypersensitivity underneath, who will become a psychiatrist with trauma expertise.
- The eight-year-old girl will have no children.
- Pour the six-year-old son who believes that witnessing his family’s experimentation on Spot is “the coolest thing ever,” and will brag about it in his memoir as a reason why he chose to become a world-renowned, robotic cardiothoracic surgeon.
- Combine the father’s orders to the ten-year-old son, barricading himself in the bathroom, that he should “Stop acting like a sissy and put on the surgical gloves, mask, and gown.”
- Have the eight-year-old daughter put on gloves and masks to help calm Spot while the father administers IV medication and hydration.
- Have the father intubate Spot, then sterilize with Betadine and shave Spot’s white furred belly.
- Let the buzzing fluorescent lighting highlight Spot’s vulnerable, swollen belly.
- Have the father swiftly and deftly slice through Spot’s abdominal skin.
- Have the daughter worry that Spot had been given a human dose of anesthetic and ask, “Is Spot’s heart supposed to be beating so fast?”
- Have the father mumble under his mask, “All is well,” dismissing her fear as that of a silly little girl.
- Have Daniel, the oldest son, whose face is a ghostly white, break out into a sweat, hands trembling and body swaying.
- Have the father snap at Daniel, who’s holding the retractor, “Stop shaking! Retract the skin and guts more!”
- Have the father’s face tighten with disgust as he yanks Spot’s pinkish white uterus, ovaries, and fallopian tubes from her abdominal cavity.
- Have the eight-year-old daughter pray, “Please God, give Dad, Daniel, and Spot the strength to survive this torture.”
- Have the eight-year-old daughter feel grateful this time to be a girl, because a girl gets off easy with her only job to throw the bloody rags into a heap on the cold cement floor.
- Have the eight-year-old daughter silently turn to stone as she witnesses the tiny unborn litter of eight puppies from within Spot’s womb slowly suffocate on the family’s ping pong table.
- Let Spot, the ever-forgiving survivor, withstand the family’s horror show.
- Have the pregnant mother, who had refused to partake, come downstairs weeping, wanting to check on Spot.
- Let the mother and daughter clean up the bloody mess, then stay with Spot until she wakes up.
- Have the eight-year-old daughter caress Spot and whisper in her ear, “So sorry about your babies. I love you.”
Nina E. Cerfolio, MD is a Castle Connolly Top Doctor, Assistant Clinical Professor of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and a board-certified psychiatrist and psychoanalyst with a private practice in Manhattan. As Associate Attending in the Department of Psychiatry at Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital, she teaches residents psychotherapy and psychiatry. Nina is passionate about the intersection of psychotherapy and spirituality and is a leading voice in the areas of holistic psychiatry, trauma, nutritional psychiatry, spirituality, and creativity. She has been featured in National Geographic Adventure for winning the Half Marathon on the Great Wall of China, Daily News for her humanitarian work during the Chechen genocide, Yomiuri Shimbun (Japan’s national daily newspaper) for her work as a first responder at Ground Zero, and on several national TV/media outlets. Nina has been published in peer-reviewed journals and has presented her original work on the psychological influences of spirituality and trauma in national and international venues.