WillSpirit!

Eye surgery paid well, interested me, challenged me, and rewarded me. But it did not ‘fit’ me. My selection of oculoplastics came as close to perfection as was possible within the choices available. It suited me much more than any other subspecialty of ophthalmology, or a general eye surgery practice. The field offered more room for creativity, more incorporation of esthetics, and (frankly) more room for error. If you operate inside an eyeball, precision counts above all else. A fraction of a millimeter can make the difference, in some cases, between success and functional blindness. The preoperative examination and postoperative care require equal attention to detail. With surgery around the eye, rather than inside it, you do not need to be so compulsive. There is more need for judgment and innovation, and less need for machine-like accuracy. That matched my skill set better.

The problem for me did not come down to dexterity. It had more to do with diligent attention to detail. That is just not my strong suit. At one point, after I left my surgical practice and was looking for answers, doctors considered a diagnosis of ADD (attention deficit disorder). Even without that label, however, I knew there were problems with forgetfulness and inattention. They say that ADD might be more appropriately named ‘selective attention deficit disorder’. I explained to one psychologist that I never had trouble focusing during surgery, but that pre-operative preparation and post-operative follow-up involved a lot of details that caused me problems. She told me that my experience fit the classic ADD model. When the adrenaline surges through my system, I am capable of intense concentration. But when the pressure lessens, my mind wanders.

So working as a Western, tradition doctor (which requires keeping track of myriad facts and countless essential tasks) often stressed me out. I struggled constantly to make sure I did not overlook some crucial clinical finding, forget to order a vital medication, omit filling out the form for a key lab test, or fail to direct the patient to return for the proper follow-up. Relating this now embarrasses me. It is only in hindsight that the problem looks so clear. While in the field, I did not allow myself the luxury of admitting my weakness. I just powered onward, and did the best I could. Sedulous care was most exhausting and difficult while in training, because I was inexperienced, and few of my professors bothered to check up on us (surprising, isn’t it, that trainees were not watched more closely?). Once out in practice, I could do a lot by rote, and the staff I worked with quickly picked up on my need for others to help manage the details and paperwork. I did a fantastic job with diagnosis, planning, and surgery. But remembering all the countless peripheral components that go into taking care of patients never came easily. And relying on your helpers to catch your mistakes is destined to fail sooner or later.

I had talent as an oculoplastic surgeon. Patients were referred to me from wide areas, repeatedly by the same doctors. Some even told me my reputation was stellar. The errors I made were no more common, I don’t believe, than those of most other eye doctors I knew. But if you overlook a crucial detail, it looks really bad. If you perform an unnecessary operation, or decide not to operate when surgery would have been better for the patient, people may disagree. Nevertheless, they won’t look at you the same way as if (for instance) you operate on the wrong eyelid. (There: I revealed it—my most public and shameful mistake.)

So in a sense, losing my ability to perform surgery may have been a good thing in the long run. It certainly reduced my burden of stress. It saved more patients from being harmed by my ADD. Even though there were only a few times that my tendency to lose focus caused significant harm to those in my care, every one of those mistake haunts me to this day. Yes, it is easy to come up with justifications. For instance, I remind myself that all physicians make errors. My view has always been that the type of blunder reflects the individual doctor’s personality. Some people make mistakes because they refuse to recognize their limits, and take on cases for which they lack adequate talent or preparation. Conversely, some surgeons are too timid, and hesitate rather than accepting necessary challenges. Some rush, and make mistakes by going too fast. Some are terribly slow, and needlessly prolong cases, increasing the chances of infection or other complications. Not a few just have poor clinical judgment. And so on. My mistakes came from a genetic inability to keep track of details. Frankly, I don’t think my missteps were any more frequent or severe than those of most surgeons in my field, but errors of forgetfulness are glaring and impossible to explain away. And even though I have run all these tapes about how ‘everyone makes mistakes’ countless times in order to feel better about my errors, in the end there is no valid excuse for injuring patients.

In my day, and probably still, no one ran aptitude tests to help medical students choose the right specialty. I knew of doctors who made it all the way into a field like ophthalmology, where you simply have to have good depth perception, only to find out they had none. We were never assessed for manual dexterity. If you were a good student you could do whatever you wanted.

I liked the eye. The first time I looked at a human eyeball through a ‘slit lamp’ (the clinical microscope used by eye doctors; you know the type: you put your chin in a little cup while a bright light flashes in your eye), it literally took my breath away. I thought the eye was one of the most beautiful sights I had ever seen, like a faceted jewel or the most intricate flower. I once wrote a description of that first view; and I have made it available on the ‘MemoirShards‘ page of this site. That piece came out of the fact that looking at that first living human eye through a microscope stands as a landmark day in my life. The way the eye’s beauty thrilled me led me to be an eye surgeon. But it may not have been the best way to select a specialty.

My instinct told me to become a psychiatrist. When the time for choosing a direction arrived, I had yet to develop the mental health history I now have. There was depression in my background, but I had never been hospitalized, and never given medications. But both my mother and my sister had been through the ‘mill’, and the subject fascinated me. The brain held more intellectual interest for me than any other organ. (The retina, by the way, develops as an outgrowth of the brain. Studying its circuitry in graduate school laid the groundwork for my later connections within ophthalmology. It is not an exaggeration to say that the retina is actually a subunit of the brain.) I also had a natural facility working with psychiatric patients. They did not scare or repulse me, as they did some other students. I found them interesting, and their plights deeply touched me. I connected well with those on the psychiatric unit, and seemed to be able to bring them comfort.

But ‘eye surgery’ had more cachet. It paid better, seemed more technically sophisticated, and attracted more driven and competitive students. Always one to look for a chance to enter a contest and win, I couldn’t resist. Plus, the research in ocular cancer that I did as a medical student went quite well, and the eye surgeon/professor who guided me had an international reputation. He mentored me, complimented me, and persuaded me to enter ophthalmology. I ignored my ‘heart’, and my natural talents, and did the more impressive, ‘ambitious’, and expected thing.

What can I say? When young, we make poor choices. By the time I figured out my mistake, so much work and time had been devoted to becoming an ophthalmologist that it seemed like it would be stupid to switch. So I motored on, and chose the field within ocular medicine that suited me the best. I did well, got a lot of recognition, and actually enjoyed the work. But it never ‘fit’.

Worse, I knew going in that my family has a strong history of severe arthritis. The emotional stress of working so hard to avoid forgetting things, and the physical stress of operating as much as I did, led to a liability for my neck that it could not sustain. My spine failed me, and I had to abandon the career. That led to my psychiatric collapse, from which I have been recovering for a decade. I am now better, but permanently marked as a ‘mental patient’. And my body has been irreversibly scarred by the medications.

Sometimes I think this is my retribution for the mistakes I made as a doctor. If so, then I have paid my dues. The distress I experienced from the shabby way several mental health clinicians treated me, and the horror I felt watching my body get wrecked by psychotropic drugs, have been so great that I don’t think I need to undergo any more ignominy or torment to balance the scales. This feels liberating.

So I have a clean slate. The old me has been burned. The silly arrogance, stupid misdirections, careless errors, and exaggerated drive to win have all been incinerated. I am free. Crossing that wobbly bridge from a high powered surgical career to long-lasting (though thankfully not permanent) disability took a long time, and nearly drowned me in regret, humiliation, and grief. But I am still here. Crucially, I have forgiven myself. I am still marching forward into the mists of fate, and have not jumped over the edge to avoid them.

This essay, this baring of my defects as a surgeon, would not have been possible ten years ago. Now that I have been so long out of the field, and can look back with objectivity, I see things far more clearly than I did at the time. And I no longer have a surgeon’s reputation to uphold. I can be honest. I did much good as a oculoplastic specialist: most of my post-cancer reconstructions, for instance, came out exceptionally well. But the whole time I spent in practice, I lived in fear of that critical mistake. Now it is all in the past. As devastated as I was on that day I described in my last post, the day I knew that a decision during surgery had been dictated by pain rather than clinical judgment, the day I knew the only ethical choice was to stop operating, as frightened as I then was, I now realize that everything I went through had to happen for me to be released from bondage. Losing my career was inevitable for many reasons. For my sanity, for the benefit of those patients who might have suffered harm, for my neck, and for my enlightenment.

I hated the bottomless despair of a difficult ten years. It felt like hell to spend my nights awake in anxious terror, feeling the disgrace of my weaknesses and failures becoming public knowledge, knowing I had lost every shred of status and all sense of financial security, and eventually watching critical parts of my body get destroyed. But now I understand. I get the point of suffering. I know that life is not all about having things go well, about ‘winning’, about getting what you want. We are here to learn. Some of us are destined to suffer more than the average amount of anguish. In the end, if we survive, we have more empathy for others, and for ourselves, than we could have found any other way. My emotional privations and my public defeats brought me to what I consider a ‘wisdom’ that always eluded me before. They cleansed me and brought me peace.

This relief sculpture by Eric Gill reminds me of the best of Christianity. The purification by suffering, admission of sinfulness, and acceptance of divine forgiveness, are what I have needed to get to this point. Even so, I do not know if I consider myself Christian, although for a time after my ‘visions’, I most certainly did. Christ came to me in a concrete form, and rescued me from my torments. If I had been able to maintain my faith, I might have been spared the descent into hell that followed. Looking back, I suspect my soul needed a period of intense suffering to allow myself to accept absolution. I needed to pay for my mistakes as a physician, and atone for wasting my God-given talent by choosing a career based on ambition rather than a mission of helping others. Perhaps I needed to feel the sting of punishment before I could accept the tenderness of forgiveness. However it came about, on my best days I am serene, accepting, and grateful for the trials I’ve survived. What greater blessings can we ask from life?