Graffiti

Doing an oper­a­tion a thou­sand times makes a dif­fer­ence. Like Steve Austin, the bionic man, my oper­a­tions these days are “bet­ter, stronger, faster.” No mat­ter what I thought when I fin­ished “train­ing” and how I thought I was teflon and all-knowing, I had not done any­thing a thou­sand times in the oper­at­ing room. Now I have. I am still not Michael Jor­dan (go to this link and click around). I am me, but I am prob­a­bly near my prime as a sur­geon. I know what I know about sur­gi­cal dis­eases, and by that I mean that I actu­ally know. This is no longer some­thing I have read about. A chef knows the five mother sauces. It is the work­ing vocab­u­lary from which cook­ing springs. I know what that feels like now. It has been twenty years to get here. I know how to cut and to sew and how to think about oper­a­tions, and I can be cre­ative with­out being stu­pid. I know how to get around in someone’s abdomen and not waste time, and that is beau­ti­ful and fun. I can prac­tice surgery now as a craft.

I am writ­ing this because it feels good to be in this place with my work. I will prob­a­bly have three com­pli­ca­tions tomor­row; or maybe I am like a graf­fiti artist, mak­ing sure my horn is blow­ing on the wall of this post, but I don’t think so. It’s just my truth as I know it now. As demor­al­iz­ing as surgery can be when things go south, I can only do my best and, as far as I know, I am always doing my best, but I am also doing my best work now. The feel­ing good part I started this para­graph with is based on…I don’t know, but it does.

Humil­ity, true humil­ity, is about being right-sized in the world. If I am one down or one up, my ego is run­ning the show (think about this, espe­cially the one down), but when I am right sized, I am telling my best approx­i­ma­tion of the truth and show­ing up for the per­son who is telling that truth.
So much of my life (maybe yours too) has been about accept­ing some­one else try­ing to make me smaller or worse, mak­ing myself smaller to fit in some mean­ing­less cookie mold. Say­ing what is, and let­ting that hang in the air like the per­fect cloud it is, is lib­er­at­ing. Try it.

And finally, when look­ing for a sur­geon, look for one who is 20 years in or so, admits to being an expert about the ques­tion at hand, and (and this is most impor­tant of all and I am not kid­ding) who con­vinces you that she/he knows they walk on land, require food and water and are not sit­ting on the right hand of god. You’ll know the dif­fer­ence in them if you know it in yourself.