Outside her office, I no longer knew who I was. Because I wasn’t working, I didn’t feel like myself, a neurosurgeon, a scientist—a young man, relatively speaking, with a bright future spread before him. Debilitated, at home, I feared I wasn’t much of a husband for Lucy. I had passed from the subject to the direct object of every sentence of my life. In fourteenth-century philosophy, the word patient simply meant “the object of an action,” and I felt like one. As a doctor, I was an agent, a cause; as a patient, I was merely something to which things happened.
