click to enlargeMaya was married this weekend.  her folks live in Golden, Colorado, near the grave of Buffalo Bill.  Elevation at their home is almost eight thousand feet.  This means there's 20% less oxygen in the air.  So sea level people like me need to breathe in 20% more to feel normal.  I found my heart racing after I ran up a flight of stairs!

Maya is my best friend from my residency program.  She was the first person I met when I went to Rochester, MN for my interview.  Two years ahead of me in training, she left for fellowship in San Diego after my third year.  Now, she's a well-known Pediatric Orthopedic surgeon who works at Children's Hospital of San Diego.  

She met her husband, Dan, at a Christmas party a few years ago.  It was practically "love at first sight."  He's a terrific man and has an extraordinary 11-year old daughter, Haley.  Here are some photos from the weekend and the wedding. Maya wore the same dress (remade of course) worn by her great grandmother, grandmother and mother.  The dress is more than 100 years old!  Each time it has been remade slightly since each woman had a different shape.  The material had aged to a beautiful gold color.

Maya's parents, Kitty and Rock, have a home in the woods which overlooks beautiful, snow-capped mountains.  Numerous bird feeders set around the perimeter of the house attract all sorts of birds.  It is mating season for the hummingbirds, so we saw scores of them, dive bombing all over the place.  Also, the neighboring herd of Bison had just delivered some babies.  All things bode well for this marriage.

Congratulations, Maya and Dan!  I am honored to have been a part of your wedding and I wish you the very best.

Namaste.

Just yesterday I received an email notice stating that some pins used in total knee replacement are being recalled by the company.  Lucky for me, I have never used these pins during surgery.  However, this and notices like this are a wake-up call to me and others regarding our routine use of man made materials in a human person.

So many people suffer from conditions for which we have no good solutions.  What we don't know in medicine so dwarfs what we do know.  But people do not want to hear this. What they want is for me to tell them "We can fix that.  We can make you 100% again."

Fact is, there is no such thing as making someone "100%. "  And what is One Hundred Percent anyway?  

An old medical joke comes to mind:

Patient:  "Doc, after surgery, will I be able to play the violin?"

Doctor:  "I don't see any reason why not."

Patient:  "GREAT!  Cause I've never been able to play before!"

While we as physicians have come a long way in treating painful and dangerous conditions, we are simply human.  We aren't magicians.   But the perception of physician as magician, or shaman, persists.  There must be some magic formula, some "laser surgery" that can cure our patients.  More than one patient of mine has come to the office demanding an MRI.  These folks believed that an MRI (which is a diagnostic test, used to find out what might be wrong with someone in certain conditions) would cure them.  Cured by a test!

Perhaps we can apply the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to disease.  Perhaps the hunting for them or the studying of them can knock the disease processes out of their orbits.  Just enough to cause a spontaneous cure.

If only.

Truth is, we can do what we know how to do.  We can continue to research problems and find new and better solutions.  We can think and try and hope.  We can believe that one day we'll be smart enough to tackle the toughest problems  and to bring our patients back to that One Hundred Percent level.

You see, doctors want to help.  We become frustrated when we can't.  And sometimes, in trying to help we make things worse.  By inserting faulty pins.  By performing surgeries that don't come out as we had planned.  By doing what we know how to do since we aren't smart enough yet to know how to fix the problem.

Sometimes the hardest thing to do as a physician is to admit when we don't know.  Perhaps a course in humility ought to be added to our medical school curricula.