Jay Wellons - All That Moves Us: A Pediatric Neurosurgeon, His Young Patients, and Their Stories of Grace and Resilience

The Littlest Among Us

I am a pediatric neurosurgeon. That means I operate on children of all ages with brain and spinal cord problems. Those problems translate to tumors, blood vessel malformations, brain or skull development problems that need surgery, hydrocephalus, spina bifida, trauma; the list is long. I sew nerves back together if they are torn during birth using suture as fine as human hair. Some operations we do on teenagers on the verge of adulthood and some in the first week of life, including premature infants that weigh even less than one kilogram. I used to think that was small until I started doing spinal cord surgery on fetuses inside the uterus a few years back.

For the record, I dont usually lead at parties with my work. When people outside the hospital ask me what I do, I tell them I work in healthcare. Then, over about five more questions, if they take it that far, the term pediatric neurosurgeon finally comes out. My wife tells me that nothing can bring a party to a halt like talking about the importance of car seats and bicycle helmets, especially if I start telling stories from work.

My father had wanted to be a doctor. I feel it is important that you know that before we get started. Well before I was born, he had considered leaving a successful career in business and entering medical school. It was risky, but as a Korean Warera National Guard pilot he was used to risk. Earlier in his life, just after air force flight school and before the start of his first job, he had worked with a family medicine doctor, and the experience never left him. The kind older doctor had given my father his own stethoscope after their time together and told him that he would make a wonderful doctor one day. I have that stethoscope now. There is a little inscription on the bell that has Dads name and MD after it. Its like a relic from an alternate history. In a brief one-year push after leaving the working world, my father took postgraduate classes and passed entrance tests and came to the very cusp of getting himself there, but by then he had two small children and a wife at home and no way to pay for it or to make any kind of living for them. He tried. Ive seen the letters detailing unsuccessful attempts to secure the finances necessary for tuition. So, over time, he set that dream aside. Then, years later, I was born, a third child, very unexpected. From nearly that moment on, it was his hope that I would be a doctor.

At least initially, I fully bought into that dream. As a child, a few times I found myself interested in other careers. I was fascinated by flight and wore my fathers flight helmet around the house. Taking that path, I was told, meant too much time away from family. Such irony now. Focus on what could be accomplished on the ground. I realized just how pleased my parents were when I wrote my grade school career essay on being a doctor.

Over time, like most teenagers and proto-adults, I decided to take a different path, make my own way. I became an English major and tried to focus on writing but somehow, somehow kept taking premed classes and did well enough on the MCAT to get into medical school. I studied Joyce and Yeats and Shakespeare in college with professors who had trained at Trinity College in Dublin and at Oxford, and I took creative writing from Barry Hannah one semester and Ellen Douglas the next. The former pinched the filters off whatever cigarettes he was chain-smoking at the time in our small by-permission-only class and gave me a B minus on my writing. The latter sat with me and helped me and later wrote to me in a copy of Black Cloud, White Cloud, To Jay, whose works I remember with great fondness. (And no one knows until right now that I turned in the same stories to them both.) Despite all of that, I looked up after boarding school and college and found myself in medical school living my fathers dream, and that was just fine. I thought maybe I was there to learn something about what it means to be alive. I really had no idea what was to unfold over the next twenty-five years.

I cannot even begin to count the number of people outside the field who told me not to be a neurosurgeon. You are nothing like them, they said. Neurosurgeons are tired and grumpy. Egotistical. They work too much. The patients do terrible. Everyone dies.