They say practice makes perfect. Theory is, the more you think like a surgeon, the more you become one. Better you get at remaining neutral, clinical. Cut, suture, close. And the harder it becomes to turn it off. To stop thinking like a surgeon and remember what it means to think like a human being.
Surgeons are control freaks. With a scalpel in your hand, you feel unstoppable. There's no fear, there's no pain. You're ten-feet tall and bulletproof. And then you leave the or. And all that perfection, all that beautiful control, just falls to crap.
No-one likes to lose control, but as a surgeon there's nothing worse. It's a sign of weakness, of not being up to the task. And still there are times when it just gets away from you. When the world stops spinning and you realize that your shiny little scalpel isn't gonna save you. No matter how hard you fight it, you fall. And it's scary as hell. Except there's an upside to freefalling. It's the chance you give your friends to catch you.
It's one of those things that people say: you can't go on until you haven't let go of the past... Letting go is the easy part, going ahead is painful, so sometimes we fight and we try to keep this unchanged.
But things can't always remain the same... at a certain point we have only to let go... to go ahead... because it doesn't matter how painful it is... it's the only way to grow up.
I have an aunt who whenever she poured anything for you she would say "Say when". My aunt would say "Say when" and of course, we never did. We don't say when because there's something about the possibility, of more. More tequila, more love, more anything. More is better.
Maybe we're not supposed to be happy. Maybe gratitude has nothing to do with joy. Maybe being grateful means recognizing what you have for what it is. Appreciating small victories. Admiring the struggle it takes to simply be human. Maybe, we're thankful for the familiar things we know. And maybe we're thankful for the things we'll never know. At the end of the day, the fact that we have the courage to still be standing is reason enough to celebrate.
As surgeons, there are so many things we have to know. We have to know we have what it takes. We have to know how to take care of our patients... and how to take care of each other. Eventually, we even have to figure out how to take care of ourselves. As surgeons we have to be in the know. But as human beings, sometimes it's better to stay in the dark, because in the dark there may be fear, but there's also hope.
We all heard the alarms go off and we ignored them.
We challenge luck. It's human nature. When they tell us to not touch something, we usually do. Even if we know it'd be better not to.