Doesn’t the surgeon get any credit?

As the Detroit Free Press reported, Kelly Stafford, the wife of the Detroit Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford (parents of three), just had 12 hours of brain surgery to remove a benign tumor impinging on her cranial nerves.

Stafford announced on Instagram earlier in April that doctors found an acoustic neuroma, or a benign tumor, resting on her cranial nerves after she complained of dizziness earlier this year.

She wrote at the time that she was “completely terrified” of her pending surgery.

On Wednesday, Stafford was admitted for a surgery that she said was supposed to take six hours.

It actually took twelve hours, as there was a complication—an abnormal vein. Fortunately, as she wrote in her Instagram post below, the surgeon knew how to deal with the complication, as he’d written a paper about it. 

“Now I am home and learning my new norm,” Stafford wrote Sunday. “It’ll take some time, but I really just wanted to say thank you. Thank you for all your support, thoughts and prayers. It means more than y’all will ever know.”

I’m very glad that she’s fine and managed to have a surgeon with fortuitous expertise in the complication, but notice below that the surgeon is neither named nor gets any credit: Stafford says “That’s truly God’s work.” If I were the surgeon, I’d feel a bit deflated!

I won’t mention the prayers. . .

This reminds me of Daniel Dennett’s wonderful essay about his hospitalization for an arterial issue, “Thank goodness!” Read it if you haven’t. An excerpt:

Yes, I did have an epiphany. I saw with greater clarity than ever before in my life that when I say “Thank goodness!” this is not merely a euphemism for “Thank God!” (We atheists don’t believe that there is any God to thank.) I really do mean thank goodness! There is a lot of goodness in this world, and more goodness every day, and this fantastic human-made fabric of excellence  is genuinely responsible for the fact that I am alive today. It is a worthy recipient of the gratitude I feel today, and I want to celebrate that fact here and now.

To whom, then, do I owe a debt of gratitude? To the cardiologist who has kept me alive and ticking for years, and who swiftly and confidently rejected the original diagnosis of nothing worse than pneumonia. To the surgeons, neurologists, anesthesiologists, and the perfusionist, who kept my systems going for many hours under daunting circumstances. To the dozen or so physician assistants, and to nurses and physical therapists and x-ray technicians and a small army of phlebotomists so deft that you hardly know they are drawing your blood, and the people who brought the meals, kept my room clean, did the mountains of laundry generated by such a messy case, wheel-chaired me to x-ray, and so forth. These people came from Uganda, Kenya, Liberia, Haiti, the Philippines, Croatia, Russia, China, Korea,  India—and the United States, of course—and I have never seen more impressive mutual respect, as they helped each other out and checked each other’s work. But for all their teamwork, this local gang could not have done their jobs without the huge background of contributions from others. I remember with gratitude my late friend and Tufts colleague, physicist Allan Cormack, who shared the Nobel Prize for his invention of the c-t scanner. Allan—you have posthumously saved yet another life, but who’s counting? The world is better for the work you did. Thank goodness. Then there is the whole system of medicine, both the science and the technology, without which the best-intentioned efforts of individuals would be roughly useless. So I am grateful to the editorial boards and referees, past and present, ofScience, Nature, Journal of the American Medical Association, Lancet, and all the other institutions of science and medicine that keep churning  out improvements, detecting and correcting flaws.

And a late but totally necessary addition from reader Colin: