I have always been a fan of flesh.

It's not just the way it looks, the way it smells, the way it feels when I run my fingers over smooth, soft skin. It's the way it yields under my scalpel, the way it molds itself to my will. The way it reshapes itself in ready response to my surgical training, turning a patient's body into something even more sublime than when it first walked into my office.

Some people love to mock cosmetic surgeons like myself. They say we exist only to serve the vain, wealthy, and shallow. Mammaplasties and rhinoplasties are what we're known for - or boob jobs and nose jobs, to use the more pedantic term. But there's more to it than that. I've spent months abroad, working for charities in third world countries and providing reconstructive surgeries to patients born with deformities, or mangled by the horrors of war. Even in my own beloved land of the free, where clean water and adequate food are taken for granted, my scalpel has peeled away the scars of burn victims, carved new jaws for mangled faces, and removed the unsightly aftereffects of operations performed by the practitioners of other medical disciplines in order to save the patients' lives.

But I do still perform my share of purely cosmetic procedures, of course. And yes, perhaps it is a bit shallow. But what of it? To see a woman's expression when she beholds her new cleavage, to watch a man stare into the mirror without Alfred E. Newman (what, me worry?) looking back, it makes me feel accomplished. What was the most you did for your fellow man today?

But today was a big day for me. Today was the day the bandages came off for my favorite patient. Today was the day I would see just how well the latest procedure had gone. I walked in through the door with a big, shit eating grin on my face, eager in a most unprofessional way. My personal assistant would have given me such a sardonic expression at the goofy smile if she'd seen it. But she didn't see it because she wasn't there. Because I wasn't at my office.

I traipsed past the lovely furnishings in the apartment's living room. I didn't even glance at the Thomas Kincaid paintings on the walls, stepped around the Ethan Allen sofa without a pause to admire it. Why should I? It was my own apartment. And the thing I most wanted to see was in the bedroom. There, my Tempur-Pedic bed with the satin bedspread, and underneath the satin, a human sized lump laying there.