Even as a child, I noticed that many people, especially my Depression-era grandmother, feared aging and the imminence of death. Death was no stranger to me growing up; I lost my then best friend, my Nano, and my uncle as a child, both traumatically. Yet, death was sad, but natural.
Because of this, I never understood our society’s stigma against dying, something that I’ve struggled with even in medical school. In an ideal world, we would all die at home with our loved ones caring for us, slowly slipping away in our sleep into the placid beyond, but why doesn’t it happen this way? There’s a dignity to that way because of its organic simplicity. It’s how people used to die prior to modern medicine, before we started needing to always “fix the problem.”
I never anticipated entering the field of surgery when I entered medical school, but everything about the tangible correction of problems, the medicine entailed in general surgery, and its procedural aspects excited me about the field. Yet, all of those things are focused on that goal of “fixing the problem,” which can be boiled down to resectability versus unresectability and doing everything we can to reach that moment of resectability or remission. Surgeons can prolong patients’ lives by examining whether they are surgical candidates.
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