The day my surgeon cried...

The Webster Dictionary definition for compassion is embracing the pain of another; a touching desire to help; expressing words of comfort, especially when one has suffered a loss; showing tender concern by entering another's emotional experience.

In a earlier blog I touched on the Christmas week spine surgery where everything went wrong nearly paralyzing me.  Nineteen hours in I suddenly began bleeding out and they nearly lost me.  Immediately following surgery a huge hematoma began pressing on my spinal cord slowly paralyzing me.  My dear orthopaedic surgeon, Dr. Mortara rushed back in to do the seven hour emergency surgery to remove the hematoma, so we ended up being in surgery for twenty-six hours that day.

Dr. Mortara has featured in two other blogs here, where I have shared the humorous bond we had, bantering back and forth with each other.  Like when I fractured my tailbone in two places after my horse Bashum stumbled while galloping.  I feared Dr. Mortara would be upset.  Instead he came in laughing, teasing me how I couldn't just fracture my tailbone in one place, but two.  I then responded I liked to think BIG.  He not only loved my attitude, but the ways I didn't let my dwarfism define me.  And that I was a fighter.  I had been his patient for several years prior to the spine surgery, so we knew each other quite well by then.

Two days after the spine surgery in ICU on Christmas Day, I finally awoke just in time to see Dr. Mortara coming to me.  He looked terrible.  He was very anxious to see if I still had any movement in my legs.  As hard as I tried only some toes on each foot moved.  I already knew what had happened as I was the one who alerted them something was wrong immediately following the nineteen hour surgery, which is when the hematoma was discovered.

Suddenly I discovered just how much I had come to mean to Dr. Mortara as a patient because tears began pouring down his face while he struggled to say, "Everything was going so well, and then the bleeding from out of nowhere happened.  Then this...this terrible hematoma.  You have your horse, your work, such a full life...and..."  He really began choking up and crying so  hard, I began choking up too, yet not for me...him!  I was profoundly touched by his compassion and deeply moved by his tears.

Though there were tubes everywhere and I was so weak, I managed to grab hold of his hand.

"Dr. Mortara, none of this is your fault.  WE are going to surmount this, okay?  I've got movement in some toes, and that is a beginning.  I will be focusing on my toes until they all move, then my feet, and legs.  When I leave this building, I will walk out of it.  And I WILL gallop on Patches again."

Then he cried even harder!

Through his tears though, Dr. Mortara managed to tell me it was because he was so moved by MY comforting HIM.  He had been feeling utterly devastated.

"Adelaide, that your fighting spirit hasn't been lost, is the best Christmas gift I have been given.  And I believe you WILL walk again.  When you leave this place I will be right there to walk with you."

Two months later, I did, and he did.  

Only due to hospital protocol I was made to ride in a wheelchair TO the door.  It had taken me two months 

of very hard work just to be able to do my hard won "shuffle" by then, so slowly as Dr. Mortara let me lean on him, I was escorted to the waiting ambulance taking me home, as a host of nurses, doctors, and cleaning staff who had come to know me too, were all clapping. 

Compassion is the most healing of all our emotions, though not everyone has it.  Yet for those who do, compassion is quite powerful, as it transforms lives.  Especially a beloved surgeon in ICU one Christmas Day in tears...