CHAPTER 01
SUE'S ANATOMY
"This is how my heart beats right." – H.S.
They say that I was the epitome of a perfect medical student.
In a scale of one to ten, I was number one. I was golden, no room for silver or bronze. In a cascade of alphabets, I was letter 'A'. If I were a part of constellation Centaurus, I would be Alpha Centauri – the brightest of all. If I were a blood vessel, I would be the superior vena cava. If I were a car, I would be the shiny, red Ferrari… but a Honda sounds good too – a personal bias for my name, Honda Sumiko.
Already in my second year at Oshima Ika Daigaku (Oshima Medical University), I have become accustomed to the association of this overused word, 'perfect', to myself. This reputation had been stuck on me like a shadow ever since I entered medical school. It was something I could not avoid as long as I stood beneath the spotlight. This celebrity-status was not incidental. It was innate – at least for this field we called 'medicine'.
Things weren't like this when I was a little bit younger. Back in Tsuzuya Academy, my life was everything but extraordinary. I was branded as a 'commoner', and for being one, I did not have much things to worry about. Life back then was much simpler. Hot campus gangsters, pretty cheerleaders, and soccer team captains were more popular than someone like me who had nothing special except for the fact that I was born of incredible ancestors. Our family was descendant to the great Honda Genki, a bakufu physician back in the Tokugawa Era. My parents were both doctors: my okaa-san, a surgeon and otou-san, a forensic pathologist. Hideki onii-san just recently graduated from medical school; he's currently taking his residency at the Oshima University Hospital. My little genius brother, Yoshio-kun, was a doctor-in-the-making. My grandfather was the former Head of the World Health Organization, while my grandmother was a pioneer of neurosurgery. My grandparent's parents and grandparents were doctors, and my grandfather's mother's sister's great-grand-parent's brother and grandmother's second sister's third degree cousin were also doctors. Even my dog's name wasGregory Grey (who lived in a dog H.O.U.S.E.). For me, it was like being born with a stethoscope already hung on my neck. But in high school, no one really cared about this 'Honda History'. I did not care either.
College was different. It was not a surprise that ninety-nine percent of the students here in Oshima Ika Daigaku could draw my entire family tree. Each step I take inside this medical school reminded me of my fate to continue such great legacy of physicians, especially of my mother – Honda Megumi.
Who, in the medical field, had not heard of okaa-san, Doctor Honda Megumi? If philosophy had Aristotle, Microsoft had Bill Gates, and MTV had Britney Spears, the equivalent for cardiovascular surgery would be no less than Honda Megumi herself. Okaa-san had performed more than three hundred successful heart surgeries in her entire medical career, twenty-five of which were precisely what she was known for – heart transplantation. She was the first in the world to perform such complicated medical procedure through grafts from cadaveric donors. Her name had been cited in countless medical journals and books. She had won many awards for her outstanding achievements and contributions to medicine and surgery.
My okaa-san was that great. And so, people expect me to become just as 'great' – head to toe.
Many have told me that I looked just like my mother when she was my age. At nineteen, I stood five feet, four and a half inches tall. I had a slender body, pink lips, and copper-colored hair reaching to the level of the inferior border of my scapula. I often pull my hair back with a neat, white lacy ribbon. My hazel eyes were unusually bigger than an archetypal Japanese girl, I was not drop-dead gorgeous, but I most certainly could turn heads every-so-often.
