Operating

Ged paid him for it in sorcerers’ kind, healing his eyes of the cataracts that were in the way of blinding him. Then the old man, rejoicing, said to him, “We called the boat Sanderling, but do you call her Lookfar, and paint eyes aside her prow, and my thanks will look out of that blind wood for you and keep you from rock and reef. For I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.”
– Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

I have a . . . complicated relationship with operating. It wasn’t always that way. It began simply, to the point of extremity: I wanted to go into a field of medicine that allowed me to operate. I loved doing procedures, I liked the surgical mindset of fixing things rather than deliberating forever about differentials as it seemed the non-surgical folks did, and the intensity of the culture appealed to me. It was my version of the “follow your passions” dream instilled from the days of my Disney-fied youth.

It is perhaps ironic, then, that I found myself operating less and less as the years went by, a product of the fact that my two major life interests—being the best surgeon I could be, and being a present mother and wife—were inherently incompatible. And so, I became a part-time surgeon, which over the years has taken me down just about every set-up you could imagine: the hired-gun, the pseudo-full-timer, the academician-teacher. But generally-speaking, the more kids we’ve had, the less I’ve operated.

There are certain skills you can do just as easily regardless of how often you do them: operating is not one of them. Cutting into a moving globe to remove an item four by ten millimeters in size, without damaging supportive tissues that are just a few microns in thickness, requires a level of dexterity that cannot be entirely mentally engineered. You just have to do it, a lot. And the stakes are high. There’s a character in the novel The Dutch House who reflects on leaving medicine to go into construction: “For the first time in my adult life . . . I could make a mistake fixing something, a toilet say, without mortal repercussions.” I used to fantasize about being in other kinds of jobs—any kind of job—where I could make a mistake without possibly blinding someone.

Surgeons generally don’t like to discuss their fallibility. But simply because I do a lower volume of cases than most, I carry a consciousness of that with me. There’s no room in my work for hubris. Rather, there’s a kind of forcefully-injected humility: a grappling with my limits and my anxiety, an honest assessment of my skills, a willingness to ask for help. I work with an acute sense of grace: that each result is given, not entirely earned; granted through my skill, not solely because of it. 

And the irony is that my reason for operating has, as a result, become clarified. I don’t know that I love operating, at least not in the self-aggrandizing way that in retrospect was how I came to the whole thing. I do it because I believe that it is God’s heart to redeem brokenness in the world, because I have experienced in my own life Jesus moving with compassion into my places of darkness. Because I know he moves with me in such a way every time I pick up the blade.

“For I had forgotten how much light there was in the world, till you gave it back to me.” That’s what Jesus did for me. Yes, I’ve been doing this a long time now. But I still pray, every morning as I drive in (why do operating rooms have to begin so early?), the same thing: Jesus, help me do that for these people today, for your sake. And, miraculously, he does.