The ego of a surgeon, a spiritual journey
A few nights ago, I was in the operating theater removing a dead ovary from a patient. It had twisted around its ligaments several times. The patient had come into the emergency room with severe abdominal pain. Surgery was urgent and necessary. This condition is known as ovarian torsion.
I love doing surgery because I like working with my hands and my brain at the same time. I like to manipulate and move organs around and work with the surgical instruments. I love to sew and make all the stitching even and beautiful. After surgery is complete, I get a rush and thrill of good hormones running through me and I often say to myself, “Look what I have just accomplished. I just really helped this person feel better”. I also like to admire my meticulous sewing of the skin back together.
Underneath that well intentioned self-admiration, however, lurks that ever present, why won’t you go away EGO.
I started working with plant medicines and psychedelics about 6 years ago and I have been slowly understanding the concept of the ego. Prior to my work with these medicines, I sat in Buddhist circles meditating for about 10 years, listening to dharma talks but never really understanding this ego thing they were talking about. It is now clear to me why.
The EGO was protecting me the whole time, so much so that I couldn’t even understand the meaning of the word. My ego has been my defender and guardian for such a long time in my life. It helped protect me as a child, buried my childhood trauma, and sexual abuse as a teenager. After that yearlong event when I was sixteen, my ego told me to bury the trauma deep inside, pretend it didn’t happen, bury my emotions and go back to school. My ego then got me an Ivy league undergraduate education, then medical school, and an extremely abusive residency program. There, it fully blossomed.
In medical school and residency we surround ourselves with similar traumatized individuals who also have fully flowered, and often narcissistic egos and we say things to each other like:
“you are so smart” and
“you were chosen to be in this residency program”.
“It’s only for the elite, the cream of the crop”
and this was all on top of an Ivy League undergraduate degree, yet another group with big egos. But now all this ego boosting sounds to me like blah blah blah blah blah, yada yada yada yada.
It is time to have a serious conversation about the ego now. This thing, which I only started understanding a few years ago was all about my status in society and my self-image created to hide that deeply hurt child inside of me. What made me look good in the eyes of other people and why did I need that? Through my continued journey towards rescuing my soul , I understand why. Growing up in an alcoholic house that was unable to outwardly show love, I didn’t receive the love I needed, so my ego had to step in and fill in the blanks for me. Add to that some trauma from immigration, racism, physical and sexual violence and thus my ego became very strong.
Who am I? In our toxic culture, as Gabor Mate puts it in his book, The Myth of Normal, I was chief of GYN at a large inner-city hospital in Oakland. I was an altruistic volunteer surgeon around the world. I was president and co-founder of Medicine in Action, a non-profit organization that I started in the 2005 working with women in Africa and the Caribbean, doing lots of gyn surgeries on women who would otherwise not have access. I was also an attending physician at two well respected academic institutions in Northern California.
On a personal level, I finally met my partner. He was charismatic, bad-assed, long blond haired, tall White California dude. He was a self-made businessman, who lived in a beautiful house in an upper-class neighborhood in Oakland. Furthermore, he was part of the mountain biking elite of Norcal, and our weekends were filled with adventure hanging out in the mountains. And during those trips, we were surrounded by others who had expensive bicycles, huge trucks, RVs, off road vehicles, inanimate objects, yet carrying the consciousness of the EGO. My friends Jon and Nica nicknamed their Sportsmobile the “Van-gina”.
On the outside it looked like I had finally achieved a dream that a Chinese immigrant girl could only hope to realize. My partner and I had twins together, a boy and a girl who also got wrapped up in my ego. My friends and colleagues thought I was so lucky. But deep inside there was a storm brewing.
All of this EGO was covering up my real self. I’ve counted over 40 plant medicine ceremonies now, but most of the work I do around the ego comes in this real time 3D world. The western medical complex is full of ego. Let’s examine this in more detail.
We can start with the term “non-compliant patient”? It sounds harsh and accusatory. What it says is that we haven’t even really seen our patient and we just expect them to do as we say simply because they came to see us. We get frustrated when patients don’t do what we ask them to do. It’s never our fault even if we didn’t explain it to them properly.
In Obstetrics, we get mad when our patients show up with a “Birth Plan” because this birth plan indicates to us that they want to be active participants and it drives us crazy because we want to be in control. (Although I do advocate changing the name Birth plan to Birth Intentions, you can read that in a separate blog post). For female doctors, if someone mistakes us for a nurse, we get annoyed.
And we take pride in delivering babies, when in fact, most of the time we are just guiding them out and mother and baby would have done just fine without any intervention from us. A midwife told me they were trained as “humble servants” for their patients, whereas in medical school and residency, we are trained to believe that our way is the only way to deliver a baby.
In fact, we created a whole unit in the hospital, Labor and Delivery, and tell women that they must deliver there, and it would be dangerous for them and the baby at home. While this may be true in some instances, home birth is a wonderful option for women who would like a more spiritual experience and less intervention. The American College of OB/GYNs does not endorse home births, but as I have been a practicing OB/GYN for over 20 years now, I understand more and more why women prefer delivering at home, and one of the reasons is because the EGO of the medical industrial complex itself does not exist in the home birth environment.
And surgeons, I think we have this EGO thing pretty bad, as we stand over our unconscious patients literally with their bellies wide open, in full trust that we are going to get them through the next couple of hours and “rescue” them from whatever dis-ease they are having.
But the truth is, every human being is their own healer, and surgery itself can be very traumatizing. If we haven’t done our own emotional work as surgeons, we can be causing more harm than good. If we cannot align with our patients’ emotional space peri-operatively, then we just become mechanics and not healers. This is the art of medicine.
Numerous patients over the years have confessed to me their surgeons have had such bad bedside manner that it made the surgery even more frightening. Furthermore, by the time a patient comes to see us for surgery the disease process is usually far gone and we are now removing the tumor but the stuck energy is still present in the body and spirit of that person. Only the patient can get rid of that stuck energy through methods that are generally not part of the Western Bio-Medical model of disease.
Hanging out in the operating room with other surgeons and anesthesiologists, it’s like everyone is stroking each other. It’s the academic equivalent to my now Ex-partner’s mountain biking elite parties. You can smell the ego in the air, sometimes so thick, you can palpate it. This is true whether or not you are talking about that 10 pound fibroid tumor you just took out of someone; or how you worked really well with your anesthesia counterpart to save someone’s life who had two liters of blood in her belly due to an ectopic pregnancy, which by the way, you did laparoscopically so she could go home the next day; or how big that rock you jumped over on your $10K full suspension Santa Cruz mountain bike. Okay people, the bike technology is so good these days that almost anyone can roll that big rock, so take your ego out of it. (So says my friend Joe who runs a major bike company as we joke about my lack of mountain biking skills. No ego there for me of course). These are all great accomplishments, and I emphasize that there is nothing wrong with being proud of them, but the mindfulness that comes along recognizing the accomplishment and letting the ego take over can be very subtle and a hard balance to achieve.
With all the work I have done, decolonizing my medicine, understanding implicit bias and numerous plant medicine ceremonies, doing that surgery the other night, I haven’t felt my ego so alive in a long time. I was literally thinking to myself last night “How cool am I?” Look what I can do? I’m also pretty good looking and have a hot body. Why would my partner cheat on me for over one year with someone 26 years younger than me; an empty-headed wounded child with a daddy complex, who isn’t nearly as accomplished as I am. Sure she is beautiful, but she’s fatter, and I’m all toned from being so committed to my hot yoga. I am 51 years old and I don’t even have wrinkles because I’m a vegetarian and I take good care of myself.”
And that’s it, here it is again. Well Hello Ego, it’s nice to see you. Thanks for joining me here tonight. Hey Ego, did you actually think you could save my relationship? And by the way, if you didn’t take this dead ovary out of that patient, the next doctor would have, so don’t get out of hand.
I guess the ego is a necessary part of medicine. There has to be some healthy level of narcissism and grandiosity to open someone up and do surgery. But the trick is to not let the ego take over. Don’t let it consume you and your thoughts. Realize it’s there, it’s necessary and let it be there next to you. It is part of you; and you couldn’t survive without it. But it does not have to be within you, taking over and running your every thought and action, whether or not it shows up as pride, grandiosity, overworking among many other ways it can present.
I am NOT this patient’s savior. I simply took a tumor out. She has her own spiritual journey in this life. All humans can tap into higher source and become their own healers, as each of us is unique, with our own traumas, genetic and epigenetic imprints and environmental influences. And thus, the practice of my medicine has transformed since I was served my first cup of Ayahuasca 6 years ago. I have stepped away from downstream surgeries. I go deep with my patients. My visits can take up to 90 minutes. I find out about their Adverse Childhood Events scores, nutrition, social support, sleep patterns, recent and past stressors and so much more that cannot be done in the usual 15-20minute time slot in most large western medical institutions. And I offer plant medicines, energy and psychedelics to my patients, along with standard western medical tools, and let them choose their own path. They are their own healers. (Here is my ego again as I write this paragraph thinking how cool am I to be doing all this deep stuff with my patients)
So what are you left with after you finally strip away your ego. I am enough just as I am. I am worthy just as I am. I have something to offer others by just being me.
Who am I? I am LOVE. I am LIGHT. I am TRUTH, and I am FREE.