As a neurosurgeon you are often confronted with severe pathologies and malignant tumors with irreversible short-term prognosis. These types of tumors, unfortunately, often progress rapidly and patients with these tumors often have very short life expectancies. This is not always the case, but it is true in 95% of cases. It is therefore common for physicians to share our minds so that our feelings do not prevent us from continuing to treat patients effectively. We tend to keep emotion, so to speak, in a small corner of our brain. But sometimes events happen that make you change your view of things. This has happened to me in the last few days.
As I was saying, malignant brain tumors have a survival of 18-24 months, even with the best surgical, radiological and chemotherapy treatment. Only 5% of cases survive that average. But in the last few days I have seen four patients pass through my office, one after the other, who have surpassed that statistical barrier. Four representatives of that small, hopeful, 5%. Four people who have broken the cold statistics and have fulminated the forecasts in only fifteen days.
The first was a woman we operated on when she was 27 years old. She is now 39 and a promising young designer. Then came a housewife who is progressing perfectly. After her, a patient whom we operated on five years ago, more than double the most optimistic forecast. And finally a prosecutor who had a tumor removed no less than fifteen years ago. Needless to say that the coincidence of the four of them, in such a short space of time, made me feel an indescribable joy and the emotion, so to speak, came out of that small compartment inside my brain.
This has made me think that perhaps we should give more importance to that small, unpredictable, exceptional part that is out of the average. From my point of view, physicians are 95% rationality and 5% emotion. But reality has margins and those margins are where the exceptions that make us irremediably human escape.
After all, the 5% is not a number, they are real people. And we all have the right to think that we belong to that 5%. Even if it is just another statistic.