In the past two months, I operated on two patients who didn’t need surgery, or so I thought. But this is not one of those stories giving credence to the popular public opinion of doctors advising surgical interventions to patients who may get well even without them. This is deeply complex, emotional, and heart-wrenching. Greed, money, power, and ego have no place in stories about battling life and death, where hope and faith combat the eternal question of where one draws the line of acceptance that the end is near—the most difficult and the most beautiful conundrum in simultaneity. 

The first patient was a lady in her 60s. She had had two previous surgeries elsewhere a few years ago for a malignant brain tumour, followed by radiation and chemotherapy. In the past week, her health had deteriorated. She was in a semi-comatose condition, partly paralysed in her left arm and leg. Her husband and son had done everything they could have over the past five years to keep her going—taken her for opinions abroad, administered targeted therapy beyond regular chemotherapy based on the genetic analysis of her tumour, and enrolled her in an experimental wonder drug trial. “The tumour has returned, this time even more vociferously,” I told the family, who came to me with her reports, while she was admitted at another facility in the ICU on a ventilator.