If I wanted a circus ringmaster, I'd hire Trump. If I wanted advice on brain surgery or hospital management, I'd turn to Carson. Fiorina would make an articulate television pundit. But for president?
I had operations up until I was 18, then revision on my scars to put back my eyebrows. So I've had a lot of what is called plastic surgery. And I have huge, huge respect for what that is.
The diagnosis was immediate: Masses matting the lungs and deforming the spine. Cancer. In my neurosurgical training, I had reviewed hundreds of scans for fellow doctors to see if surgery offered any hope. I'd scribble in the chart 'Widely metastatic disease - no role for surgery,' and move on. But this scan was different: It was my own.
A simple, well-proven surgery can restore sight to millions, and something even simpler, a pair of glasses, can make millions more see.
I've had a couple of family members deal with cancer, and I remember that moment where they're going into surgery, and you just have no idea what's going to happen, and it's really scary.
After being raised as an evangelical Christian, I for years assumed that Christianity was the default - there were Christians, and then there were weirdos. I was shocked when, in college, I found that some people get offended when you tell them, for instance, that their recovery from surgery was a 'miracle.'
I wore glasses my whole life, but then I got Lasik eyeball surgery, and I fixed that.
I was fascinated by each area I studied, whether neurology, urology or surgery.
Everyone has that friend who's every day, like, 'I hate my nose, I hate my nose, I hate my nose.' You either need to come to peace with it and be like, alright, I hate it, but it's part of me - or change it. So I'm not against plastic surgery, I'm against plastic surgery when it doesn't really need to be done.
I don't think it is worth trying to look 10 years younger through surgery.
I find it interesting that 16-year-olds are having plastic surgery. People in their 40s used to think, 'I'm aging, I have to do something about it.' Now children are deciding they don't like the way they look.
Adapting your own book is like performing open-heart surgery on your own child.
In a spiritual sense, a positive attitude may help you get through chemotherapy and surgery and radiation and what have you. But a positive mental attitude does not cure cancer - any more than a negative mental attitude causes cancer.
