BY DR. JOSE MA. EDUARDO P. DACUDAO
(Reflections on an incident on the dawn of June 17, 2007 in Butuan City)
HOW DOES it feel to save the life of a human being with your own two hands?
It feels good. Rather, it feels very, very good. In fact, it’s hard to describe the goodly feeling. Perhaps, it is an infinite series of very goods.
It is the feeling after a successful operation, when one sees a human being at the verge of death wake up post-op alive and talking. It is to witness a life about to be taken, granted the grace to stay here on earth a little longer.
To see such moments, to see a comatose patient wake up alive and conscious after a successful operation, what a wonder! Somehow the event of a living flame blowing away being enkindled with the light of new life never ceases to surprise me, even after having witnessed literally hundreds of such small miracles.
There is one more thing. Whenever I realize that the instruments for a new life enkindling happens to be a decision done by my brain and an operation done by my hands, I never fail to get awestruck, even if only temporarily. Thereafter, I reason and believe that it was just a job well done, and I go about living as though nothing has happened.
Meanwhile, back in a hospital, a human being who was about to die also gets to go on living.
What has really happened? Was it a job well done worthy of professional pride? Was it the claiming of a capital investment in the form of a huge professional fee, in case the patient’s family can afford, from a decade of toil and personal sacrifice training to become a Neurosurgeon; or in case the family is indigent, was it a charitable act in order to gain indulgence to save against the day we face the Light of Judgment at the end of our lives? Or was it a mystery of a human being graced with a second chance at life?
You tell me. I don’t really know.
In any case, the goodly feeling is real.
Consequently I sometimes go off by myself and celebrate, by just enjoying the good feeling in solitude. I would sometimes go to a fast-food eatery, mentally shut out the rest of the crowd, and in silence think about the miracle of life.
Why am I saying this right here right now? Because it has just happened again, but ended in a sickening incident.
It is the morning of a new dawn, the sun is up, but I did not sleep at all last night. I spent the wee hours of the morning preparing and operating on a comatose patient with a cystic brain tumor that bled, causing a rapid deterioration of her sensorium. Pre-op, she was already comatose. I prepared the patient, and did a right frontal craniotomy and evacuation of the bloody contents of the frontal lobe cyst inside her brain. (To be continued)/PN
