Read Online Another Day in the Frontal Lobe by Katrina Firlik - Free Book Online Page A

Veterans Administration hospitals). Although supervision is always around the corner, and decent quality health care is the rule, the residents tend to run the show. At my training program, the affectionate term for our VA hospital was the “Va Spa,” a sarcastic reference to the humble and somewhat depressing standard-issue municipal edifice. The expansive, oversized room that housed dozens of patients in long rows was nicknamed “the ballroom.” On the door of our small single-room neurosurgery office at the VA, one of the residents scrawled, “Resistance is Futile.” Common knowledge dictated that it was no use trying to change the system at the VA; better just to live with the quirks and inefficiencies. Physicians with Republican leanings are quick to point out that this is what a broader government-run health care system would be like. We’d get the care we needed, but we’d all have to lower our expectations a bit, and take a number.
    Even though neurosurgery is a small specialty, you can’t lump all neurosurgeons together. Some neurosurgeons tend toward the more brainy, nerdy end of the spectrum, whereas others are more of the jock or frat boy variety. Some love to spend all day in the OR whereas others prefer to spend extra hours in the lab. A few superstars do it all, via liberal delegation, collaboration, and little sleep.
    Such distinctions can introduce a funny quirk into the academic system: a lay person might assume that a surgeon with his name on the greatest number of papers, or the one with his name in the
New England Journal of Medicine,
is
the
guy to go to for a certain type of surgery. While this certainly may be the case, and I don’t discourage this type of thinking outright, the reality could also be that this is the guy who spends far more time in the lab than in the OR. A great mind for science and great hands do not necessarily go together.
    Some renegade neurosurgeons have taken on research projects that have gone down in history—as much for inciting ethical debate as for pushing the envelope. In addition to being inspired by Harvey Cushing, my husband and I were also influenced by another neurosurgeon from Cleveland, but a living one we actually got to meet: Robert White. White became famous for many things, but perhaps most of all for his head transplant work, which he preferred to call a “body transplant.” He actually performed a head transplant on a primate in 1970, connecting all the blood vessels required to perfuse the new head. The transplanted head was fully functional, but, with no way to connect the two ends of the spinal cord, the new being was quadriplegic. However, White envisioned that this experiment, however macabre, might someday pave the way for extending the lives of people with healthy brains but deteriorating bodies, such as those who are already quadriplegic or nearly so.
    White kept popping into our lives at various times, sometimes unbeknownst to him. My father knew him from years earlier and set up a meeting—all four of us—when Andrew and I were still college students. We checked out the historic transplant lab. A year or so later, Andrew and I spent a summer month in Spain together. While staying in a rundown apartment in Valencia, we had a knock on the door one day. An animal rights activist was handing out flyers. It featured animal abuse “horror stories,” including a description of White’s work and the lab we had seen. We laughed, not at the purported abuse, but at the fact that our Cleveland buddy had made it to Valencia, to our little apartment.
    Years later, White was nice enough to attend our wedding. And, upon buying our first car together and driving it off the lot, we just happened to turn the radio on to the sound of White’s voice on a talk show. White has become legendary, especially in Cleveland, where he is perhaps best known not for his research, but for his connection to the late Pope John Paul II, for whom he served as a medical