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I was temperamentally better suited to a cognitive discipline, to an introspective field—internal medicine, or perhaps psychiatry. The sight of the operating theater made me sweat. The idea of holding a scalpel caused coils to form in my belly. (It still does.) Surgery was the most difficult thing I could imagine. And so I became a surgeon.
“How can a surgeon know where she is,” Hema was fond of saying, “unless she knows where she has been?”
Wasn’t that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted?
Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion. Still, each generation of physicians imagined that ignorance was the special provenance of their elders.
“God will judge us, Mr. Harris, by”—her voice broke as she thought of Sister Mary Joseph Praise—“by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. I don’t think God cares what doctrine we embrace.”
“A rich man’s faults are covered with money, but a surgeon’s faults are covered with earth.”
I found that the bricks and mortar of medicine (unlike, say, engineering) were words. You needed only words strung together to describe a structure, to explain how it worked, and to explain what went wrong.
To be a good surgeon, you need to commit to being a good surgeon. It’s as simple as that. You need to be meticulous in the small things, not just in the operating room, but outside. A good surgeon would want to redo this knot. You’re going to tie thousands of knots in your lifetime. If you tie each one as well as humanly possible, you’ll experience fewer complications. I want to see even tension on both limbs. The last thing you want is for Mr. Walters to have a burst abdomen when he gets post-op bloating. That knot, done well, may allow him to go home and get things in order. Done poorly it
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Medicine is a demanding mistress, yet she is faithful, generous, and true.
