GBM Part 4

This is the fourth instalment of Reflections of a Neurosurgeon. A book I'm writing in public.

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

The answer to such predicaments cannot be found in any textbook. A fact not taught during neurosurgical training. That’s because there’s already enough to be absorbed before grappling with infinite ethical dilemmas. Rather, the hope is you finish armed with the understanding that your actions carry not only physical, but moral consequences. Once I realised this I started to look for other untaught lessons. Here’s another - to be a surgeon is a gift. Not that to become a surgeon you have to be gifted, but that you will have the privilege of witnessing life’s most pivotal moments.

This gift comes from our trespassing from the public to the private. To see people at their most vulnerable. We breach the barriers of flesh and bone, navigating the corridors of the body with our instruments as both map and compass. We walk in the darkness, like Prometheus. But our theft is more subtle and saturated with meaning. We pilfer not flame, but fleeting glimpses of life's sincerest moments. The mother who, mere moments ago, was a stranger, now bares her soul in our clinic. The father, stripped of pre-tense and clothing, becomes a landscape of vulnerability on our operating table. The child, tethered to a ventilator, relies on us not just for care, but for breath. You cannot teach the importance of this. Only experience it.

But every boon contains a curse. We carry within us a gallery of faces. The relieved smile of a cancer survivor, the hopeful eyes of a child before anaesthesia takes hold, the vacant stare of a patient lost despite our best efforts. And in those vacant eyes, devoid of life and light, a second ago recognisable and now alien, we see our reflection, familiar and unknown. These images haunt us, reminding us of our responsibility, our limitations, our futures.