For years, the author and neurosurgeon dismissed symptoms of prostate cancer. Then he finally got the diagnosis he’d been avoiding …
It seemed a bit of a joke at the time – that I should have my own brain scanned. I should have known better. I had always advised patients and friends to avoid having brain scans unless they had significant problems. You might not like what you see, I told them.
I had volunteered to take part in a study of brain scans in healthy people. I was curious to see my own brain, if only in the greyscale pixels of an MRI scan. I had spent much of my life looking at brain scans or living brains when operating, but the awe I felt as a medical student when seeing brain surgery for the first time had fallen away quite quickly once I started training as a neurosurgeon. Besides, when you are operating you do not want to distract yourself with philosophical thoughts about the profound mystery of how the physical matter of our brains generates thought and feeling, and the puzzle of how this is both conscious and unconscious. Nor do you want to be distracted by thinking about the family of the patient under your knife, waiting, desperate with anxiety, somewhere in the world outside the theatre. You need to separate yourself from these thoughts and feelings, although they are never far away. All that matters is the operating and the self-belief it requires. You live very intensely when you operate.
