He gave a sonogram to an MTA worker whom he had diagnosed with hemochromatosis a year ago. Now the man’s liver was a little scarred, but it was better. It was regenerating. It was almost new again. Toby pushed the wand over and around the man’s liver. He loved this part; every sonogram, every biopsy, was always like the first time. You couldn’t believe what the liver was capable of. This never got old for Toby, not since the first time he saw it in medical school, in a textbook of time-lapse pictures of a healing liver. Livers behaved in some erratic ways, sure, all the organs do. But the liver was unique in the way that it healed. It was full of forgiveness. It understood that you needed a few chances before you got your life right. And it wouldn’t just forgive you; it would practically forget. It would allow you to start over in a way that he could not imagine was true in any other avenue of life. We should all be like the liver, he thought. We should all regenerate like this when we’re injured. On the darkest days of his marriage, Toby attended to his hospital business, and out of the corner of his eyes was always the liver, whispering to him that one day, there would be not much sign of all of this damage. He would regenerate, too.
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