GBM Part 3

This is the third instalment as I write a book in public.

If you missed the first part, you can find it here.

In the quiet moments before dawn, as I scrubbed my hands to operate on Simon for the second time, I remembered that fresh-faced doctor struggling to take blood. The harsh hospital lights illuminated more than just the sterile sink and my tired eyes—they shone on the invisible threads that connected who I was and who I had become.

Neurosurgery bends time but it also bends people. In the beginning, I was all potential energy, a coiled spring of enthusiasm barely contained by the narrow banks of my knowledge. I was all future and little present. My head was rarely in the same place as my feet. I see that eager first-year surgeon in the faces of my trainees now, their eyes wide with a mixture of terror and excitement as they hold a high-powered drill over a human skull for the first time. Do they know how this job will reshape them? How the weight of life and death decisions will press upon them, piercing them like the drill they hold?

I remember the first time I operated on the human brain. The organ that houses our thoughts, our memories—suddenly tangible, fragile, and infinitely complex. The enormity hit me with the force of a tidal wave. We are not just surgeons; we are an inflexion point. A door that can only be walked through once. At all times we hope that we are leading our patients along the right path, away from suffering. Often hope is not enough. The responsibility is staggering. As the years passed, each case added a layer to my understanding, like sediment building up on a riverbed. But just as the riverbed is reshaped by flash floods, so too was I by the pain I wrought. I made mistakes.