Rule No. 14: Time is more valuable than money.

The sacrifice of time is the critical issue for any physician, in my mind. I’m more guilty than most of surrendering my own time, as well as the time of my family. First, I sacrificed seventeen years of cumulative training to become a brain surgeon. Fair enough. It was my choice. But the sacrifices my wife and my children were asked to make were just as significant. I must remind myself that their sacrifices were not consensual. I chose that path for them because of my career.

I remember a particular morning I spent with my oldest son Josh. It is a terrible memory for me. My son was only seven years old at the time. He came up to me in the kitchen, as he was getting ready for school, and said: “Daddy, I wish I had a brain tumor.”
I knelt down. “Oh, Josh, don’t ever wish anything like that. Why would you say such a thing?”
“Because if I had a brain tumor,” he said, “you would have to come and see me every day. You’d have to, wouldn’t you?”
I could only nod. I could not speak. Tears whelmed up in my eyes.

To this day, I am ashamed by the longing that my son expressed for me, his father. Where was I? True enough I was attending to patients stricken with brain tumors. But some of that time I wasn’t there for my son. Not for his mother. Not for his younger brother and sister either. These were not wounds that I fully appreciated at the time. Nor can I undo them now. Time is not renewable, remember? Now, I can only ask to be forgiven…and I can repent.

I’ve explained, in one of earliest chapters, that in hindsight I suspect a strong part of my motivation to endure such lengthy and arduous training may have stemmed from a deep-seated sense of my own inadequacy. This, no doubt, relates directly back to a father who abandoned me-- deserted me and my mother and brother at such an early age. As John Eldredge points out so astutely in his book, Wild at Heart:
Every boy, in his journey to become a man, takes an arrow in the center of his heart, in the place of his strength. Because the wound is so rarely discussed and even more rarely healed, every man carries a wound. And the wound is nearly always given by his father.

Eldredge’s words have brought me some comfort. I’ve begun to take ownership of my own heart’s wound—and the ones I’ve inflicted. I’ll admit that I spent too much energy trying to convince everyone about my “worth.” But especially my father who would die without ever seeing me after he left more than fifty years earlier. I’ve begun to see that I deserved better. Okay, so maybe that is part of rationale for a lot of what I have done.

The decision to dedicate myself to becoming a neurosurgeon wasn’t in vain, however. In retrospect, I chose a difficult, demanding sub-specialty in Surgery because I needed to prove something to myself too. Neurosurgery was like a lofty summit. I wanted to climb to the top because it was a worthy trial of my mettle. That’s goal enough. But I also wished to go deeper than that. I wanted to delve into the substance, the mystery of the mind. In a way, I wanted to find out where does a person go to be? We find ourselves chasing our own reflections. Where does the I—the consciousness that perceives the Universe—live? We follow the tracks wherever they lead, even when it may bring us face to face with our demons, snarling in their den. That has proved a more fulfilling search than I ever imagined.

It may be every person’s destiny to question until that inquiry gets down to three ultimate questions: First, why am I here? Secondly, why do I have to die? And lastly, is this world truly all there is or it a reflection of the Creator’s mind behind it? As Timothy Johnson (both a physician and a minister) writes in his remarkable tome, Finding God In the Questions:
…the more we learn, the less likely it seems that it could all have “just happened.” And for me the most convincing argument that the universe has been “designed” is the extraordinary way it is calibrated to allow for the genesis and continuation of life itself.

I believe that God is in love with life—all of it. The creation of Homo sapiens is a skillful, masterful creation, uncanny for the clues it carries about its originator. If God created us, then where else could we turn—as conscious life--but inward to find the truth? The statistical likelihood that God exists seems to me overwhelming. It is the inescapable conclusion I reach as I look at myself, my fellow men and women, and the Universe around me. So my personal search has occurred as a result of God’s direct inspiration. It has been the path that the God created for me to follow. So many doors have sprung wide, so many opportunities held open to me that never would have been had I not been a neurosurgeon. Every step of the journey occurred as it was meant to happen.