10.

What Counts

Holley didn’t fail to notice how interested the doctors became when she

mentioned my trip to Israel. But of course she didn’t understand why it
was so important. In retrospect, it was a blessing that she didn’t. Coping
with my possible death was burden enough, without the added possibility
that I was the index case for the twenty-first-century equivalent of the
Black Plague.
Meanwhile, more calls went out to friends and family.
Including to my biological family.
As a young boy, I’d worshipped my father, who was chief of staff for
twenty years at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem. I
chose academic neurosurgery as a career in order to follow in his
footsteps as closely as I could—despite knowing I’d never completely fill
his shoes.
My father was a deeply spiritual man. He served as a surgeon in the
Army Air Force in the jungles of New Guinea and the Philippines during
World War II. He witnessed brutality and suffering and suffered himself.
He told me about nights spent operating on battle casualties in tents that
barely held up under the blankets of monsoon rain hitting them, the heat
and humidity so oppressive that the surgeons stripped down to their
underwear just to be able to endure it.
Dad had married the love of his life (and his commanding officer’s
daughter), Betty, in October 1942, while training for his stint in the
Pacific Theater. At war’s end he was part of the initial group of Allied
forces occupying Japan after the United States dropped atomic bombs on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As the only U.S. military neurosurgeon in
Tokyo, he was officially indispensable. He was qualified to perform ear,
nose, and throat surgery to boot.
All of these qualifications ensured that he would not be going