Solving for Why by Dr. Mark Shrime

Author:Dr. Mark Shrime [Shrime, Dr. Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2022-01-25T06:00:00+00:00

Footnote

i I’ve chosen to use “people with albinism” instead of the more common “albino” because the latter has taken on derogatory connotations.

Chapter 14

It comes at its own timing, when I am ready for it—humble, respectful, not expecting it, somehow placing myself lower than it, not above it.

—TIMOTHY GALLWEY

THERE IT WAS. MY why. I’d had the epiphany. I’d articulated what I wanted my life to be about. I’d solved for it.

That should have been it, right?

Well.

Because I had made sure to secure my return to clinical practice before I left for Mercy Ships in 2008, I flew back from Liberia to Toronto and to the planned safety of the anodyne. I completed a second fellowship in microvascular reconstructive surgery, then moved to Boston, where I landed in four months of Risk-fueled unemployment. By January of 2009, I started my first full-time doctoring job in the United States.

A less combative chairman laid out his goals for my job: build a monolithically successful (read: busy) surgical oncology practice, remove head and neck tumors from patients in New England, and reconstruct defects with tissue from other parts of their bodies.

From a fibula, Toronto taught me to create a jaw. From wrist skin, a tongue. From the shoulder blade, a palate. Each piece of tissue was harvested in tandem with its blood supply and transferred to the gap left by the removed tumor. Carefully placed sutures no bigger than a human hair, and even more careful nursing aftercare, usually meant graft survival and a patient with an intact face.

It’s thrilling surgery. It’s complex, elegant, magnificent. I was good at it.

Also, I didn’t like it.

A year into the Boston job, I returned to Mercy Ships for a few weeks. Before I tell you more, though, I have to introduce you to Dr. Gary Parker.

Imagine lashing Jesus and the Buddha together with some wry wit and stuffing them into the six-foot-three-inch body of a missionary surgeon. That’s Gary. His why moved him to Africa over thirty years ago, where a temporary stint with Mercy Ships turned into three decades. He met his wife, Susan, on the ship, raised his kids on the ship, and has devoted his entire career to surgical care for the world’s forgotten poor.

Operating with Gary is an unparalleled experience. He navigates head and neck anatomy like a New York City cabdriver. The man has seen more Alimous than I ever will.

He’s a legend around Mercy Ships. When I arrived to the ship in Liberia, I—no joke—swooned the first time I saw his bald, bearded head. “That’s Dr. Parker!” I whispered to the person next to me. “It’s him!”

When I returned to the ship the next year, he met me at the top of the gangway, wrapped his lanky arms around me. “My son has come back.”

When Gary talks to you, he talks to nobody but you. Four hundred people live on the Africa Mercy at any one time, but coffee with Gary is coffee with only Gary. Nothing’s off-limits in those coffee conversations: politics to religion to relationships to what approach we’d use in tomorrow’s case are all fair.

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