Sublime

Because the brain mediates our experience of the world, any neurosurgical problem forces a patient and family, ideally with a doctor as a guide, to answer this question: What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?

Mourir. Réflexions sur le dernier chapitre de la vie,

The families who gather around their beloved—their beloved whose sheared heads contained battered brains—do not usually recognize the full significance, either. They see the past, the accumulation of memories, the freshly felt love, all represented by the body before them. I see the possible futures, the breathing machines connected through a

A mind brought low by a body: that was his life in a nutshell.

les parents d’un enfant qui s’était fait hospitaliser le soir même. Il était venu pour des maux de tête et les examens avaient révélé une tumeur au cerveau. Ce médecin, que j’avais écouté avec une admiration muette, ne leur communiqua pas seulement les éléments médicaux. Il aborda tous les aspects humains et tragiques de la situation et leur

leptomeningeal carcinomatosis, a rare and lethal infiltration that brought with it a prognosis of only several months and the looming shadow of swift neurologic decline.

Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present. Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes

A young nurse, one I hadn’t met, poked her head in. “The doctor will be in soon.” And with that, the future I had imagined, the one just about to be realized, the culmination of decades of striving, evaporated.

medical rite of passage and a trespass on the sacrosanct, engendering a legion of feelings: from revulsion, exhilaration, nausea, frustration, and awe to, as time passes, the mere tedium of academic exercise.