Tag: surgery

Miracle. All of it.

Live & Learn41 Comments

7:45 am. Yesterday morning. X-ray reviewed. Referral made to Oral Surgeon: “Young guy, really good, my patients really like him.” I return home and wait for phone to ring.

How long has it been? 6 months? 9 months? A year? Same dentist is grinding down the jagged edges of a broken wisdom tooth, bottom left. “You should get it pulled. It’s only going to get worse.” The answer was reflexive: “No.” Somebody wanted it there. It’s been there for more than 50 years. ‘Til death do us part. A small grin builds from left to right, as if to say: “Have it your way.” Yes, your patient is the same guy who refused teeth whitening, the crown-replacement, the mouth guard for night-time teeth grinding and anything but the basic maintenance program.

So it was. My tongue started working on the foreign. The new. The crack. The edges. The gap. Sliding over and around the edges, into the crevice, into a pocket, a repository for nubs of pistachios, bitty kernels of popcorn and hard corners of raisins – working to remove what the brush and floss failed to accomplish.

Months later, this thing turns to a low throb, exacerbated by my latest food obsession, crunchy granola. By the bags. Upper and lower teeth hammering on the hard grains, nerve endings pressure tested.

Then comes the Night. The low throb turns to a searing pain, the left ear aching and can’t bear to hold a 1/2 oz ear bud to pipe in a podcast, a playlist or any form of distraction.

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We might lose this child

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boy-clouds-reach-light

The team knows and I know that we are running out of time. The anesthesiologist looks up at me and I see the fear in his eyes. . . We might lose this child. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is like trying to clutch-start a car in second gear—it’s not very reliable, especially as we are continuing to lose blood. I am working blind, so I open my heart to a possibility beyond reason, beyond skill, and I begin to do what I was taught decades ago, not in residency, not in medical school, but in the back room of a small magic shop in the California desert. I calm my mind. I relax my body. I visualize the retracted vessel. I see it in my mind’s eye, folded into this young boy’s neurovascular highway. I reach in blindly but knowing that there is more to this life than we can possibly see, and that each of us is capable of doing amazing things far beyond what we think is possible. We control our own fates, and I don’t accept that this four-year-old is destined to die today on the operating table. I reach down into the pool of blood with the open clip, close it, and slowly pull my hand away. The bleeding stops, and then, as if far away, I hear the slow blip of the heart monitor. It’s faint at first. Uneven. But soon it gets stronger and steadier, as all hearts do when they begin to come to life. I feel my own heartbeat begin to match the rhythm on the monitor. Later, in post-op, I will give his mother the remnants from his first haircut, and my little buddy will come out of the anesthetic a survivor. He will be completely normal. In forty-eight hours, he will be talking and even laughing, and I will be able to tell him that the Ugly Thing is gone.”

~ James Doty, MD, from “Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon’s Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart”

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