All That Moves Us: A Pediatric Neurosurgeon, His Young Patients, and Their Stories of Grace and Resilience

by Jay Wellons

My first two years at Duke for my residency were a blur. That two-year blur turned into a six-year blur.

and I was left with a path stretching out in front of me. For all my uncertainty about how I would spend my life in medicine, it is but one irony that I would devote my career to trying to better understand the anatomical system that had failed my father.

I know now that I would come to see him in the patients that I cared for, and also see myself in the families’ grief.

For many years, I’ve kept an imaginary place just outside my vision, a plain field with very green grass. It came about out of necessity to give me a place to put these memories. When I would encounter something beyond comprehension, something that would cause me to question my faith or fill me with profound sorrow, I would sit quietly and think of that green field just outside my perspective. I would picture myself walking along the row of small mounds until I would find a new place, untouched. I would remove the sod and dig a hole in the ground and put the memory of that child whose story ended in sadness in a box. Then I would bury the box in the hole in the field and replace the sod and tamp it down to a little mound. Each time, I would do that. Then I would leave that green and walk back into life.