The artist in your operating room
“The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” — James Joyce
When I asked my friend Cory about her new job, she told me she cleans at the hospital.
Cory had previously worked for a house-cleaning service, where she was mostly hired by wealthy people to dust around sculptures and vacuum nothing out of plush carpets. She said she liked it okay but it’s hard to know — Cory’s not one to complain. But working 9–5 didn’t give Cory the time she craved, the time she needed, to paint. Cory is an amazing artist, which I say as someone who knows nothing about art but knows they love looking at Cory’s work.
So Cory tried to find a new job, something that allowed her more prime painting time, which for her is usually the morning. Knowing that insurance ate up half her house-cleaning paycheck, she really wanted something that came with some sort of health care plan. This narrowed her search down to a few larger companies and organizations in Fort Collins, one of which was a local hospital/medical organization.
Cory told me when she got the job, and then I didn’t see her for a few weeks (she’s prone to bouts of disappearing). The next time I ran into her, I asked her how the new gig was going. She said good, she liked the people and the 2–10:30 p.m. schedule worked well with her painting routine. We left it at that, and went on to talk about books and dad issues.
Several months later we made plans to get lunch and catch up. I asked again about her work, and she said it was good, she still liked the hours and cleaning never has bothered her.
I couldn’t think of anything else to talk about, so I asked her to tell me more about it. That’s when I found out that Cory doesn’t vacuum hallways or wash windows. Cory cleans operating rooms post surgery. She mops up human feces, picks up bone particles, power sprays blood off of ceilings. I immediately perked up. She was surprised I was interested.
Five days a week, Cory goes to work in the OR. She spends the entire shift with her cleaning partner, a sweet, tiny, ageless Filipino woman named Lucy who’s been at the hospital 10 years and thinks she has the best job in the world. When I came to visit them during their break in the hospital cafeteria, Lucy offered me her chips. When I declined, she gave me her chips.
In their break room, there’s a large screen with a video into each of the 12 operating rooms, where they can see surgeries in progress and vacant rooms ready to be cleaned.
Cory and Lucy do the “terminal cleaning,” which means the deep, end-of-day clean, that only happens once every 24 hours. The immediate post-surgery cleaning has already been done, which according to Lucy makes their job easy. It doesn’t look easy.
Their uniforms are green scrubs (I learned from my friend Melissa — also a painter — that the color is likely chosen because scrub green is “restful” for eyes tired out by staring at its compliment, blood red). Lucy and Cory split up the room, each one tackling half, meeting in the middle to clean the surgery bed, turning over every one of its cushions and metal legs, using some industrial-strength cleaning chemical with a distinct smell.
The two women might as well be baking a pie. They chat and laugh, at times fall into the rhythm of their work or even pull the equivalent of office pranks on each other. Once Cory snuck ketchup packets up from the cafeteria, squirted them all over Lucy’s freshly cleaned floor, and then said, “Hey I think you missed a spot.”
“Cory, if you’re gonna try to trick me, don’t use so much ketchup,” Lucy said in her heavily accented English. “I could smell it.”
Cory laughed loud, uncontrollably.
A few days ago I was with a friend and her son who is adorable but who had also gotten snot all over his face, his hands, then the table. In this moment I couldn’t look at him. I couldn’t stand the sight of the greenish goo, and I definitely couldn’t finish my sandwich.
The other day Cory found a piece of bloody bone on the floor, leftover from a knee surgery. She tossed it with the rest of the dirty rags, and then went down to the cafeteria for “grill night” and and had a black bean burger with ketchup.
At first, when Cory told me they call her cleaning crew the Environmental Services Staff, I laughed a little, thinking back to the job titles I used to make up for myself on resumes post-college: “Hospitality Manager” — pizza restaurant hostess or “Freelance Lifestyle Blogger” — still a pizza restaurant hostess.
If anything, Cory’s job title is downplaying her crucial contribution to modern health care. If Cory “misses a spot,” leaves something unsanitized or even forgets to wipe a few inches of the visibly clean wall with the bacteria-killing spray, lives are literally at stake. She knows that within 12 hours of her finishing a room, it will be occupied by someone in the most exposed place they’ve ever been, knees open, hips open, bodies open, susceptible to the world’s invisible killers. It’s up to Cory to make sure that none of them are left behind when the morning’s surgical blade makes its first cut.
Cory paints in layers. She starts with a base color, often on the opposite end of the spectrum as the finished product. When I visited her at her studio, she was just starting to paint a scene from her picturesque snowed-in weekend in the mountains. The canvas was completely covered in globs of purpley-black paint.
She lets it sit between layers, often working on two paintings at once in order to utilize the dry time — not unlike her favorite surgeon, who can perform multiple surgeries at the same time, weaving between the rooms with, well, a surgical precision.
On a trip to Italy last year, not content to paint from a photograph, Cory set up on the landscapes of Tuscany to paint plein air, wanting to capture the light, the colors, the moment and the mood of her surroundings. The trip had a huge influence on her work at the time, as the places we go and the things we see and the smells we smell inevitably do. I wondered how all this blood and sterilizing spray, pristine hallways and shards of bone, would leave their mark. And then I looked at the tree she’d just painted, growing green and lively from the yellowing grass, somehow clear and vibrant through the chaos of her brush strokes, and realize it already has.
All the paintings pictured here are Cory’s. For more, check out her website.
