Carrying loss while saving lives

That week, I was carrying a baby who was no longer alive. My body gave me no warning, no bleeding, no cramping. Just silence. And so I went on with my routine: attending rounds, writing discharges, putting on my scrubs. I was a surgeon in training, but also a mother in mourning, though no one around me could see it.

On Wednesday, I was on call. That morning, I stood as first assistant, opposite a distinguished surgeon, for a coloplasty in a young man who had ingested battery acid the year before in a suicide attempt. It was one of the heaviest procedures I had ever witnessed. The long, delicate mobilization of colon, the reconstruction of his esophagus, the careful hope stitched into each anastomosis. A year before, he had tried to end his life; now, he was being given back the possibility of eating, of living.

Yet as my hands held the tissue steady, I thought of the contradictions inside me: a patient fighting for life after choosing death, while I silently bore death inside me, longing for life. Surgery has a way of placing life and loss side by side on the same table. That day, it was more than metaphor, it was the reality I carried under my scrubs.

The night of that call was long. I checked vitals, reviewed charts, answered questions. And yet, behind each ordinary task, I was carrying a secret weight. When the ward grew quiet, I cried softly. At dawn, exhausted, I stepped outside. The sky was streaked with orange and pink, and I took a photo of the sunrise, almost instinctively. A song played on repeat in my head: “In another life, I would make you stay.” It was my silent farewell.

When I reached home later that morning, I noticed the first brown stain, I knew the bleeding had begun. My heart clenched, but strangely, I also felt a fragile sense of clarity.

Looking back, I know now that this was my most rewarding day as a surgical trainee, not because it was easy, but because it taught me that being a surgeon is not only about holding a scalpel, it is about holding grief, contradictions, and still showing up. I learned that saving lives can happen even as you lose something precious of your own. The patient survived his operation; he would eat again, live again. My baby did not. Yet both stories: the one I lost and the one I helped preserve are now stitched into the fabric of why I chose this path: to stand at the threshold between life and death, and to serve, no matter which side I find myself on.