I'm not trying to pat myself on the back with this, but I was reviewing and fixing errors in the original post when something just hit me. I reread the last three paragraphs and I feel like I've never connected the sheer gravity of Kevin's situation, and all from how these three paragraphs are almost entirely composed of medical body horror. I wrote them together because they were thematically connected, but I didn't put together the grim picture it paints side-by-side like this. Reading it now and realizing this feels like an epiphany, but a terrible one, like discovering the Les Misérables movie is a musical only after you paid full price for it.
In short, everything that can be wrong with Kevin's surgery has gone wrong. On the medical side, you have necrosis, tearing, separation, nerve death, bleeding, sutures that have sat in place for months. Yet on the side of exterior factors, being Kevin and the doctor themselves, Kevin constantly irritates the thing and the only way the doctor could care any less is if they outright blocked Kevin's email, as all they do to "help" is constantly reassuring him everything is fine and doing what I can only describe as the medical equivalent to procrastination.
The closest, and I mean absolute closest thing to a positive I can use to describe Kevin is that he is absurdly hopeful. He's cruel, malicious, spiteful, yet he always seems to have a positive outlook. However, while this would make a normal person seem endearing, it just makes a despicable person seem naive. It doesn't help that he constantly tries to argue against his very existence by claiming that he's just an outlier and is not a fair representation of the surgery, which completely ignores that he got a surgeon who is one of the most experienced with the procedure in the entire world and is statistically responsible for three out of every twenty people who have the procedure yet things are going as badly as they can possibly get.
Very early in the thread, I believe I described Kevin as a living nightmare. A thought experiment that would trigger a fight-or-flight response from the sheer horror of imagining yourself in. It still holds up, yet every time I want to feel bad for Kevin, he reminds me time after time why I don't.
