The sword has two edges...

I read the presidential address of the new president of the college of surgeons and realize indeed, clearly that surgery is about the people. He was from Portugal. It does sound a bit pompous, and I can easily imagine someone from India giving a similar address. (http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/836034?nlid=73946_2381)

Surgery  is a subject, indeed, it is technique, and it is principles, but at the bottom, it is about the people. People who allow us access to  their insides,  give us liberty to tinker with the inner recesses of their being, with a trust that we will help them. It is that trust that fuels long  hours, long days and longer nights. The joy of a smile the next morning, the liberty that we both experience when we lead them on to discharge home. As much as they are released, we too are permitted the joy of the moment. It is about moments, some of which can be fraught with danger and a knife blade distance away from disaster. Many sequential steps taken in concert, not just by me, but by all who toil alongside as a team. Our or team functions as a  finely tuned orchestrated instrument. At the end of it all, we can have the joy of telling a people, we did our best, and it was good enough. You have a new lease a life, a chance to live better.

However, there are also those to whom we cannot say these words, those who have come closer to the knowledge of their impermanence on earth as a result of our delving into the depths of their body. Those to whom our borders of benificience have been reached and we can only behold them dancing like wraiths in another world to come. To these we can hold out the hope of eternal life, and point them to the way to a peaceful end, the final peacemaking with life, and a death that is to come. It is not a defeat, or something to be shunned, but again, it is about people, who come our way and our sharing of the truth we see and transmit to them.  A sword has two edges, a scalpel has only one.

I cannot think of any other way of practicing surgery. I am grateful for this great liberty that people lend to me, for we are but an instrument, and our job is to keep our cutting edge honed. For it is not really us who weild the scalpel, we are wielded. The sword has two edges, the scalpel only one.