My Father’s Hands

I believe without a doubt that we all have a path in life. In that respect, my career as a surgeon was inevitable. But as far as this worldly life is concerned, it’s fair to say that I chose the field of surgery in large part because of my father’s hands.

My father’s hands. Big, gentle, gracious, useful. Just like the person. Problem-solver, answer-giver, plumber, doctor, builder, you name it, my dad will do it. He can fix a car, a toilet, a TV, a table. He can build a fountain, pave a road. He can coax a lamb out of a sheep’s womb, cajole peppers out of well-toiled soil. He diffuses tense situations with thoughtfully placed words, makes you feel at home whether you have business here or not, and treats you like you’re human according to your humanity, not your wealth.

My father is a surgeon. A vascular surgeon, which I never thought made much of a difference until surgery residency. Until then, I thought the specialty was all about old people who smoke and have bad arteries or varicose veins and every medical problem in the book. And much of it, to be honest, is about that. But there is also a terribly elegant art to it.

In its simplest description, the human body is a 5-liter bag of pipes filled with blood. Of course, there are also the airway apparatus and the plumbing systems, but without the sheer volume of liquid pumping through this bag of skin, the rest would be functionally nonexistent. So when we talk about giving someone blood thinners for peripheral arterial disease, or obliterating someone’s veins for varicosities, or, more dramatically, reinforcing an aneurysmal aorta, it is no trivial matter.

Growing up on a farm in California, the fact that my dad did surgeries that tinker with this lifeblood in astonishing ways never mattered to me. He was just my dad. For me, he’s never been a hero for repairing an aorta or saving a limb. He was special for many other reasons. It was not until my vascular rotations that I realized those qualities I so admired had much to do with an equally striking profession.

A picture tells a thousand words, but I’m not a photographer—paragraphs are my snapshots. The following are a few:

One: I’m standing outside the house near our makeshift barn in the freezing cold at 5:30 am. My dad is with me, kneeling to inspect Catarina’s mangled foot. She is shifting her hind legs, unable to bear weight after a run-in with some barbed-wire fencing. It’s a bad sign. My dad cleans up the wound with a garden hose, putting his thumb over the spout to deflect the force. He pulls out a tube of betadine he keeps in the house in case anyone gets hurt. While he cleans, he teaches. “You see, horses are very sensitive animals.” Catarina shuffles her feet in discomfort, lending quiet agreement. He waits patiently, then wraps the foot up in gauze and goes back to stroking her, continuing his reflections on horse psychology. We do this daily until the wound heals.

Two: It’s the first week of my vascular rotation as a resident. I’m bent over a hospital bed, cutting out devitalized tissue from a veteran’s gangrenous foot as he watches Maury Povich. He’s almost deaf, so when I enter the room, I yell into his ear, “It’s time for our date, Mr. Miller! We gotta stop meeting like this!” He smiles vacantly in my general direction. I tell myself we have a special relationship, though I’m not sure how much he comprehends. I take off his protective boot and unwrap the dressing to expose our putrid villain. I take my scissors and forceps and slice away. Something makes me remember my dad, perhaps Catarina’s injury or a more distant memory. I kneel next to the malodorous wound, thinking of my dad nudging his glasses up the bridge of his nose to examine the health of a rosebush. “You have to remove all the dead leaves,” he’d tell me as I watched him purposefully snip away hard-earned branches. “It will grow better this way.” I return to the task at hand, thinking of the fresh pink tissue that will appear if I do my job well.

Three: I’m five years old hiding under a dressing table. A few minutes earlier, my father had gone downstairs in our newly built house to investigate an odd noise, only to be shot through the bare glass windows by an armed intruder. Blood dripping, my father then gathers my sister and I into a hiding place before calling the police. After what feels like hours, we finally exit the house in a human chain, where he stands outside the ambulance, hands compressing his eye wound, refusing to be taken to the hospital until the police have safely retrieved our nanny. Over the next several years, as I develop my own surgical career, I will contemplate in awe over how he continued as a surgeon for decades, suturing wisps of prolene into life-giving vessels, with a piece of shrapnel wedged in his cornea. It is that combination of grit, humility, and precision that I love about my father and surgery.

It was not until after completing residency that I realized how far from my own humanity I had strayed in the process. In training, I believed the best surgeon was simply the most knowledgeable, most published, most technically excellent one. In practice, I am no less concerned with those skills, but far more in tune with the skill of my heart. Surgeon or not, the rules of engagement are the same no matter what endeavor we choose to pursue. An unwavering commitment to the preservation of hope and dignity is required, whether the subject is a horse, a rosebush or a human being.

I learned this from my father’s hands. Not in the operating room, but in the garden; not as a surgeon, but as a veterinarian; not by his critiques, but by his living example. It is not something one can learn from studying a textbook or hearing a lecture. It is a matter of the heart.