Bruce Campbell is an otolaryngologist who blogs at Reflections in a Head Mirror.
Old age is no place for sissies.
-Bette Davis
“I want the surgery today!” She started to cry. “I’m ninety-four years old. I’ll accept any risk. Just take this thing out!”
She looked back and forth between the anesthesiologist and me. Her golf-ball sized tongue cancer had been growing over the past six months. It wasn’t changing from day-to-day, but it had increased over the course of the three weeks since we had …
Students undergo a conversion in the third year of medical school: not “pre-clinical” to “clinical,” but “pre-cynical” to “cynical.”
— Abraham Verghese, MD
The scalpel hovered over the swollen, red and inflamed mass peeking through the opening in the sterile drapes. The patient lay on her side facing away from us, clutching the stiff emergency room pillow against her face and moaning as she rocked back-and-forth. Whenever the surgeon manipulated the mass, …
The present time has one advantage over every other – it is our own.
– Charles Caleb Colton
The cherubic young man smiles from the black-and-white class photo. His open, relaxed appearance captures my attention. He sits on a wooden bench at the far right end of the front row, his sharp white shirt and patterned tie cinched tightly beneath his three-piece wool suit with the stylishly wide lapels. He looks directly at the camera …
She was nearing the end of a long and interesting life. Her birth was announced on the party line in her rural community’s first telephone system. Her death, which would come soon, would be shared on Facebook and via cell phone. She had graduated with a degree in home economics from the University of Minnesota in 1938 and had worked for a meat packing company during and after World War …
Whatever we learn to do, we learn by actually doing it; men come to be builders, for instance, by building, and harp players by playing the harp.
-Aristotle
I groaned. “Don’t make me operate with him again! I assisted him in surgery just last week!”
I was low man on the totem pole and there was no point arguing. All of the residents and fellows kept track of the rotation and I knew …
Confidence is contagious. So is lack of confidence.
-Vince Lombardi
“So, can you leave this here with us?”
I was part of a group of U.S. surgeons traveling to Eldoret, Kenya, seeing patients and helping the Kenyan ENT surgeons learn surgical techniques. Our two week mission allowed us to work across-the-table from Kenyan colleagues, discussing surgical approaches, demonstrating techniques, and reviewing all aspects of surgical care.
“I have never seen such a thing!” my …
I was working side-by-side with a Kenyan ENT doctor at his hospital in Eldoret, Kenya. My wife, Kathi, and I were part of a team of head and neck surgeons organized by Indiana University spending two weeks working with Kenyan ENT surgeons to help them build confidence to perform operations independently. In rapid sequence, we were seeing dozens of patients who had signed up to be examined and hoping to …
The future of robotic surgery can be determined only by probing the possibilities. To ignore the potential for extending the boundaries and safety of surgical care with robotic technology seems unwise.
-“The Future of Robotics,” Bulletin of the American College of Surgeons (July) 2013; 98:9-15.
It is a spring morning in July 2047. Jenny, a nursing assistant, emerges from an exam room and gently closes the door. She is wearing scrubs tastefully covered with …
You cannot connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.
-Steve Jobs
“Doesn’t that window open any wider? Bring in another fan!” the surgeon demands.
Beads of sweat gather at the edge of his cloth cap and the circulating nurse steps up periodically to wipe them away. Heat and city noise roll through the open windows and into the operating room. The brief morning rain shower has left the …
Medicine offers you a front-row seat on life. Meaning is all around you. When you can see it, it gives you a sense of gratitude for the opportunity to do this work.
-Rachel Naomi Remen
The first-year medical student cried openly during the session. Not hard, but enough to be embarrassed.
“I’m really sorry,” she said, “but this is one of the things that scares me most about going into medicine. I cry …
Do not now look for the answers … At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
Two men, Ted and Ron, were long-term professional colleagues. I do not believe that they were particularly close, but they had been acquainted during their working lives. Each had retired.
In what was a remarkable coincidence, both men were diagnosed with …
Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability to ever reconstruct a dead world in its completeness.
-Simon Schama
“Tell me about your prior cancer treatment,” I say. “When did you have the surgery and radiation?”
“It wasn’t a surgery,” He tells me emphatically. “It was a biopsy.”
“But the doctor SAID it was a surgery!” chimes in his wife.
“Yes, Dad. You have a long scar on your neck,” adds his …
Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?
-Henry David Thoreau
It is almost 7:00am I carry my briefcase and lunch bag from the car to my office. I nod to some of the night shift employees heading home. Another day has begun.
I type my password and check the computer, reminding myself of the twenty patients I am scheduled to see today …
Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.
-Jose Ortega y Gasset
The senior resident hauled our little band of medical students down to the radiology file room. As he dug through the heavy manila x-ray jacket searching for films, he told us the patient’s story. “This 63-year-old lady was really sick when she came in. Heart attack a couple of years ago. New trouble …
God helps those who help themselves.
-Something that sounds like truth but fortunately isn’t mentioned in any religious text
“I’m gonna beat this thing again, Doc! I just know it!”
Over the course of several years, I helped care for a man with a very rare cancer that recurred over-and-over. With each new tumor, he became more focused on beating the disease and despite the repeated setbacks, he remained eternally positive. He spent …
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
-Annie Dillard
I wish I could add up all of the moments I spend waiting for things to happen.
I wait for computers to boot up. I wait for computer screens to load. I wait for programs to ask for and accept my user name and password for the umpteenth time so I can view a CT scan and then re-enter a different …
Skill to do comes of doing.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are in the last steps of getting surgery arranged; the counseling is complete and the consent is on the clipboard. Just as the patient is putting pen to paper, she asks, “When I’m asleep, you’re not going to let some trainee practice on me, are you? I mean, I wouldn’t let the brand …
Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.
– James Baldwin
She sits in the examination chair reeking of cigarette smoke. “I had a new sore under my tongue last week,” she tells me. “It was bad.”
A year ago, she finally developed a large throat cancer from her years of smoking and drinking. The cancer had spread to the neck lymph nodes and …
Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads which sew people together through the years.
– Simone Signoret
Allen’s cancer has continued to grow quickly. He raises his chin so I can see. I check my notes from a month ago and pull out my ruler and make new measurements. I jot down my findings and turn to look him in the eye. We both know this …
“I will never forget that day.”
She smiled broadly.
“It was about a week after my cancer surgery and I had finally worked up the courage to look in the mirror. I knew you had rearranged things a bit, okay. Moved stuff around. Taken things apart and jammed them all back together, right?”
I probably would not have said it quite like that, but she was correct that her surgery had involved removing part of her …
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