How to Save a Life

My favorite television show, Grey's Anatomy, had an epic episode last year that started with the following quote...

For most people a hospital is a scary place, a hostile place, a place where bad things happen. Most people would prefer a church, a school, or a home. But I grew up here. While my mom was on rounds, I learned to read in the OR gallery. I played in the morgue. I colored with crayons on old ER charts. The hospital was my church, my school, my home. The hospital was my safe place, my sanctuary. I love it here.

I've never been much of a TV watcher. I'm not the type who can't wait to get home, plop down on the couch and watch hours of TV. And to get me to commit to watching a show each week is no easy feat. Typically it is only the written word that moves me.

So, why did Grey's make the cut? Its dialogue crackles, and its stories move along at a fast clip and pull me in. The mix of medical stories and character development never lets me down. I've become invested in the characters and look forward each week to finding out where the story has taken them...McSteamy, Yang, Alex, Meredith, Teddy, Bailey and the others.

It's a delicate mix of high-stakes drama and comedy. One moment I am crying hysterically, which for me is not an everyday occurrence, and the next I am laughing so hard that I forget the tears that flowed before the commercial break. After watching each episode I feel as if I've experienced an emotional release that takes me to a higher place.

I know, high praise for a TV show, but the real reason I love Grey's is the biggest...I could have written the main character, Meredith Grey's, back-story. You see, I too grew up the child of someone who is a "god" in the operating room. I learned to read while waiting on Momma to finish in the OR. My friends and I had wheelchair races in the halls by the morgue. And I colored on old surgery charts at the nurses' station.

But there was a darker side to my happy place.

Even today, I vividly remember in my memory sneaking in the back door of the hospital with my Momma and running up the steps as the alarm shrilly sounds. People aren't supposed to come through that door and kids aren't allowed in the hospital, but she just ignores the alarm and the rules. Sitting at the nurses’ station and playing with all the different colored tapes, drawing on order sheets and making paper airplanes. Grabbing Momma's meal book from her white coat pocket and eating breakfast or dinner by myself in the hospital cafeteria.

Anaesthologists, X-Ray technicians and other surgeons help me with my homework. They tell me stories until I fall asleep in the rolling chair in the OR with my head on the desk. With patience and honesty, they answer my questions: "What's a code blue?" or "What is hospice?." The only eight-year-old ever held by hospital security (for grabbing a wheelchair and making a break for it); my hospital rap sheet is long and storied. My teachers horrified when I say I didn't get do my homework done because I was at the hospital late last night when Ms. Grant coded three times.

I accompany Momma on rounds; her dedicated and cherubic intern in my sneakers and John Deere t-shirt. At the door of certain rooms, I sit outside on the floor with my book and backpack and entertain myself. What is the great mystery in these rooms, something hidden from the eyes of children, a dark secret? Maybe someone is dying? Some surgery gone horrifically wrong?

What was behind the door in these "no entry" rooms? The patient young and quite fine. Momma just wants to move through them quickly.

Other rooms I follow Momma into, holding the chart for her. These "kid friendly" rooms are often occupied by the elderly, those who were in the last chapter of their lives. I shyly enter the room, hiding behind and holding Momma's white coat jacket and listen as Momma introduces me to the patient, and the patient was introduced to me, as Momma asks the patient, "So, how are you today?"

After a few visits I would get to know these patients and would stay in their rooms while Momma finishes rounds. Reading books, hearing their stories, and, now that I am older realizing, that I was bringing sunshine into someone's life who hasn’t been visited by family or friends or loved ones in quite a while. My Momma's own special medicine for her patients, those who needed something to hold onto in order to make it another day.

And, no, my Momma never lies to me when one of these "special patients," as she calls them, passes away. She is always honest and says that they are at peace and that death is nothing more than a new beginning.

I know that some of you are horrified and are asking, yourself “What parent would allow a child to have this kind of upbringing?” My Momma, Lil Bit, is a general surgeon. She is a GOD in the OR. Patients arrive so broken and so hurt that you can't imagine they are going to make it, and she saves them. Momma can tell instantly what is damaged and where to make the first cut to start the healing process.

But this God-ness comes at a price. What happens when Momma, much like Meredith's Momma, Ellis, changes out of her scrubs and picks up her child from the nurses? Those substitute-Mommas-in-pink who look after her child and never joked that babysitting falls under “other duties as assigned”?

Before I go further, let me be clear — my Momma loves me, I know that. And her love is a BIG love. But medical training often stunts a doctor’s development as a human being; physicians become stunted, doctors can forget how to take care of anyone but their patients, forget how to take care of even themselves. They become better in the OR but worse at the game of life. They learn to detach, and for a surgeon it is even worse — it all comes down to three words — cut, suture, close. Vitals go from bad to worse, patients crash for no apparent reason, people don't make it, death is their constant companion, so how can doctors become attached to someone when the scientifically trained mind tells them that everyone has an expiration date that can come at any time?

Momma loved each of her children, but had a hard time physically showing it. She was not there for important events even though she wanted to be. School plays, birthdays, Easters, Christmases—they could all wait; people needed to be saved. Growing up I had a hard time balancing these two ideas — that a Momma who was not there for the mundane could still love me? I wanted my Momma, I wanted her with me, I wanted the June Cleaver Momma. I wanted to come home to a house that I didn't have to clean myself, a full fridge that I didn't shop for and clothes I didn’t have to fold and put away. But alas, and might I add, thank God, it was not to be.

Having an alcoholic, abusive father didn't help the situation. I had a lonely childhood, and I learned to fend for and entertain myself early on. I created games and stories in my mind to take me away from the present. To borrow another phrase from Grey's Anatomy, I grew up a bit "dark and twisty." Parts of me always see the bad. I can imagine disaster at every turn, and if you have any doubts, you should check out the music on my iPod. I have playlists that would make the most dedicated Emo cry, but they cheer me up.

Because of my troubled childhood, I'm your guy in a crisis. Blood, hysteria and damage do not faze me; I am actually the opposite. The bloodier the mess, the better. I coldly assess the situation, determine my options and solve the problem — cut, suture, close. I run my own life like an OR. I manage the mundane and the highly abnormal the same way: life is either an appendectomy or a cardiac embolism. Nothing shocks me.

When a half marathon goes horribly wrong and my two aunts and uncle are trapped in dangerously cold and rapidly dropping temperatures, rain and hail, I'm the one to I take charge. I cut — look around and realize how bad the weather has become, locate everyone using all the tools at my disposal, my cell phone, my voice and my eyes, and move the group forward toward shelter. I suture — when one aunt starts to break down, I look her in the eye and tell her it will be fine, that I will make this horrible situation okay, and I send her to the closest church. I close - I find help in the church (warm blankets, coffee and dry clothes) and then call a friend to take us home because to go back out in the elements to get to our car would cause the stitches to rip open. Because of my dark and twisty nature, I know that no one else will save us; I have to do that.

I'm successful today. I'm independent. I've loved and been loved, even though these relationships didn't always turn out as I had hoped. I continue to put myself out there and look for love. I challenge myself at work and home. I succeed. I push forward. I rise and fall with life but have never had a code blue. I look and reach for little moments that bring heaven to earth, moments that lift me up; something transcending space and time, moments like a doctor who has cut out a wicked tumor or delivered a baby must experience. No infection sets in, although my wound may take a while to heal. Like a modern medical miracle, I rise from the operating table, every time.

I look back on my childhood, growing up in hospitals the way Meredith Grey describes wistfully on my favorite TV show, and realize that it was the best thing for me. My childhood started me down a path unlike many others, a path that would make June Cleaver faint. This "dark and twisty" path prepared me so that I can see light everywhere, whether it be in the early morning sunrise, the blazing mid-day, the crimson sunset or the darkest night.

Because the hospital is my happy place, my sanctuary, my school and my church, I am the metaphorical surgeon I am today, and I would not have it any other way. I cut, I suture, I close. I feel, I love, I heal. This patient is healthy and has been discharged from the hospital.