The Bitter Sweet

Every day in the hospital I am a first-hand witness to miracles, but I also see incredible tragedy and sorrow.

This month I am working with the Spine Team on the Neurosurgery Service. Yesterday began at 430 when I rolled out of bed and ended at 1030 when I collapsed onto my mattress after a day that felt like an emotional rollercoaster.

During a 5 minute lunch break, I happened to see a patient in the cafeteria who I had taken care of last month while working in the Burn Unit. She was the lady who lost her right arm to the fleshing eating bacteria and spent the first couple weeks of her hospital stay balancing precariously on the brink of death. She was sitting in a wheelchair at a table with her parents and her boyfriend. I said hello and told her how great she looked. She had a huge smile on her face. I have never been so excited to see one of my patients eating a hamburger and milkshake from Burger King.

Later in the day we finished a long spine surgery on a lady who has had back pain and associated symptoms in her legs for many years. When she woke up from surgery, we realized that she was now paralyzed. She went to sleep in the operating room with full use of her legs, and 8 hours later woke up without sensation or strength in her lower extremities. We could not account for why she was paralyzed, but obviously something happened during surgery that caused this horrible complication.

The sweetness that I experienced earlier in the day when I saw my patient from the Burn Unit recovering so well was now tempered by the bitterness of seeing a woman paralyzed from surgery. We do our best as surgeons to heal our patients with the blade, but there is an element of risk in what we do that cannot be entirely mitigated no matter how conscientious we are. Even 100 success stories cannot rinse the bitter taste of one bad outcome out of our mouths.