I believe without a doubt that we all have a path in life, and that path is to God. In that respect, my future career as a surgeon was always inevitable, literature major or not. But as far as this worldly life is concerned, it's fair to say that I am in medicine in large part because of my father's hands.
My father's hands. Big, gentle, gracious, useful. Just like the person.
I cannot express the kind of security a child--particularly a young girl--feels growing up in a world tethered by a father's love. 27 years into my life, I am still coming to appreciate how my father's support has buoyed and shaped me. Forget the early morning coffee sessions, the bailing me out of trouble in high school (ok, and long after high school), the countless hours philosophizing about life. That's all extra. I'm just talking about the sheer knowledge, every day of my life, that I have a dad. My dad.
And what is a dad, anyway? Problem-solver, answer-giver, plumber, doctor, builder, you name it, my dad will do it. He can fix a car, a toilet, a TV, a table. He can build a fountain, pave a road. He can coax a lamb out of a sheep's womb, cajole peppers out of well-toiled soil. He diffuses tense situation with thoughtfully placed words, makes you feel at home whether you have business here or not, and treats you like you're human according to your humanity, not your wealth.
And that's not even the half of it.
My father is a surgeon. A vascular surgeon, which I never thought made much of a difference until my vascular surgery rotation this past month. I thought the specialty was all about old people who smoke and have bad arteries or varicose veins and multiple medical problems. And a lot of it, to be honest, is about that. But there is also a terribly elegant art to it.
In its simplest description, the human body is a 5-liter bag of pipes filled with blood. Of course, there are also the airway apparatus and the plumbing systems, but without the sheer volume of liquid pumping through this bag of skin (thanks, heart), all the rest would be functionally nonexistent.
So when you're talking about giving someone blood thinners for peripheral arterial disease, or obliterating someone's veins for varicosities, or, more dramatically, reinforcing an aneurysmal aorta (literally the lifeblood to the lower half of the body bag), it's kind of a big deal.
Of course, the fact that my dad does surgeries that tinker with this lifeblood in astonishing ways never mattered to me. He's just my dad. For me, he's never been a hero for repairing an aorta or saving a limb. He's special for many other reasons. The kind of reasons you keep to yourself sometimes because they're so ardently pure, so defiantly unaffected that you ache to keep it that way.
A picture tells a thousand words, but I'm not a photographer--paragraphs are my snapshots. So here goes:
One: I'm standing outside the house near our makeshift barn in the freezing cold at 5:30 am. My dad is with me, kneeling to inspect Catarina's mangled foot. She is shifting her hind legs, unable to bear weight after a run-in with some barbed-wire fencing. It's a bad sign. My dad cleans up the wound with the garden hose, putting his thumb over the spout to deflect the force. He pulls out a tube of betadine he always keeps in the house in case anyone gets hurt. While he cleans, he talks. "You see," he starts off, "horses are very sensitive animals." Catarina shuffles her feet in discomfort, lending quiet agreement. He waits patiently, then wraps the foot up in gauze and goes back to stroking her, continuing his lecture on horse psychology. We do this until the wound heals.
Two: On another visit home, I wake up early to go to Starbucks and hit the gym. I feel a guilty twinge as I see my dad, up early too, sipping coffee from a mug and tending to his grape vines. I should be spending time with him. I get my coffee fix, do my forty minutes on the treadmill, and go home to join him. By now he's moved on from the vines to the vegetable garden. It's a humble effort, historically threatened by gophers and infection, but my dad insists on growing food as part of an experiment in sustainability. Most people would give up and go to Costco. Not my dad. Instead, he tilled and fertilized a plot of land and planted cauliflower, eggplant, broccoli and lettuce. A few years later, our first successful harvest yielded two fistfuls of buttery greens and a single crown of broccoli. Ever thoughtful, he triple-washed them and gave the whole lot to my brother-in-law to take to his mom.
Three: It's the last week of my surgery rotation. I'm at the VA cutting out devitalized tissue from a veteran's gangrenous foot as he lays in his bed watching Maury Povich. He's almost deaf, so when I enter the room, I yell into his ear, "It's time for our date, Mr. Miller! We gotta stop meeting like this!" He smiles pleasantly in my general direction. I tell myself we have a special relationship, though I'm not sure he comprehends much of what's going on. I take off his protective boot and unwrap the dressing to expose our putrid villain. His ulcer is so severe the entire heel bone is exposed, but he can't feel a thing. I take my scissors and forceps and slice away. Something makes me remember my dad, perhaps Catarina's injury or a more distant memory. I kneel next to the malodorous wound, thinking of my dad nudging his glasses up the bridge of his nose to examine the health of a rosebush. "You have to remove all the dead leaves," he'd tell me as I watched him purposefully snip away hard-earned branches. "It will grow better this way." I return to the task at hand, thinking of the fresh pink tissue that will appear tomorrow if I do my job well.
When you say you want to be a surgeon, people take notice. Like every other profession, there are preconceived notions about what it means to be someone who cuts people up and puts them back together. But the rules of engagement are the same no matter what endeavor you choose to pursue. An unwavering commitment to the preservation of life and dignity is required, whether your subject is a horse, a rosebush or a human being. It's not something you can learn from reading a book or hearing a lecture. It's something that comes from the heart. I learned this from my dad. Not in the OR, but in the garden; not as a surgeon, but as a veterinarian; not by his lectures, but by his living example.
I hope my hands do justice to their precedent, wherever they find themselves.
