He noticed an unusual tremor in his hand while operating, and that is when he decided to get himself an MRI, as soon as he finished the surgery,” a friend informed me, speaking about a mentor of mine whose scan revealed a high-grade brain cancer. “For someone who was operating on a tumour the same day it was diagnosed in him, it must have been devastating,” he deduced. My mentor was a renowned brain tumour surgeon, crisp and meticulous in extricating tumours  from every crevice of the brain, as he had over three decades. I trained with him a few years ago in North America and we operated for long hours together—me tiring much earlier than him, and I was exactly half his age. He was kind and gentle and revered by all those whose lives he touched.

“It is a sad day indeed when one of our own falls victim to the disease we fight daily,” another senior colleague commented in an email, encouraging the neurosurgical community to send prayers and healing vibes his way for a speedy recovery. It made me wonder what it must feel for doctors to be afflicted by the very affliction they’ve been trained to treat. We know every single hidden truth of that ailment, and more often, the focus is on the negative than the positive, especially if the diagnosis involves a malignancy. We know what can go wrong with surgery, the side-effects of radiation and chemo, and worst of all, the finality of the outcome. And in addition, we are surrounded by colleagues who know the exact same things and yet infuse us with an indestructible spirit of hope, the one we are all expected to portray.