Saturday by Ian McEwan

Reading it at the moment. A novel set in a single day of a neurosurgean's life. Brilliant and poetic.

An excerpt from the excerpt at New Yorker.

The culmination of today's list was the removal of a pilocytic astrocytoma from a fourteen-year-old Nigerian girl who lived in Brixton with her aunt and uncle, a Church of England vicar. The tumor was best reached through the back of the head, by an infratentorial supracerebellar route, with the anesthetized patient in a sitting position. This created special problems for Jay Strauss, for there was a possibility of air entering a vein and causing an embolism.

The Nigerian girl's operation lasted five hours and went well. Andrea was placed in a sitting position. Opening up the back of the head needed great care because of the vessels running close under the bone. Rodney leaned in at Perowne's side to irrigate the drilling and cauterize the bleeding with the bipolar. Finally it lay exposed, the tentorium--the tent--a pale delicate structure of beauty, like the little whirl of a veiled dancer, where the dura is gathered and parted again. Below it lay the cerebellum. By cutting away carefully, Perowne allowed gravity itself to draw the cerebellum down--no need for retractors--and it was possible to see deep into the region where the pineal lay, with the tumor extending in a vast red mass right in front of it. The astrocytoma was well defined and had only partially infiltrated surrounding tissue. Perowne was able to excise almost all of it without damaging any eloquent region.

He allowed Rodney several minutes with the microscope and the sucker, and let him do the closing up. Perowne did the head dressing himself, and when he finally came away from the theatres he wasn't feeling tired at all. Operating never wearies him--once busy within the enclosed world of his team, the theatre and its ordered procedures, and absorbed by the vivid foreshortening of the operating microscope as he follows a corridor to a desired site, he experiences a superhuman capacity, more like a craving, for work.