A Bunch Of Old Guys
I’ve reached the point where I am now a senior neurosurgeon …like it or not. No “Peter Pan” for us. This grab shot at the recent AANS meeting is four of us who were fellow residents together at NYU. One is semi-retired. I get to dive about every weekend and feel semi-retired. We’re all a few pounds heavier and got some grey hair. Kids are grown; curiously none became neurosurgeons. Overall the years have not been too bad. One of our residency fellows (not pictured here) passed away a couple years ago of a malignancy. The meeting also featured a jab at our NYU Chairman, who took a dim view of spine surgery in his time (1994).
Of course history has proven that spine surgery is a vital component to the income of neurosurgeons nowadays. Go ahead and laugh but they really did think we didn’t know how to screw in a screw?
And then there is always a bit of history. Graham Teasdale was an invited speaker. His claim to fame is the Glascow Coma Score published forty years ago. Anyone in trauma, emergency medicine, neurology, or in neurosurgery will be familiar with this score because it is used to describe level of consciousness that could be translated from hospital to hospital. It’s quite a thrill to be listening to a man who has changed/affected our very thinking for so many years.
I have indeed been fortunate to have seen and heard so many men who I would consider to be heroes in neurosurgery. What I have learned is that things change, things stay the same, and that one needs to keep an open mind to know which is which.
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