A few families have even claimed that reckoning with a fatal diagnosis strengthened their bond. I’m here to tell you that dealing with the brain and its illnesses is comparatively simple. It merely requires a good mechanic. What’s trickier to work with is the mind. There are symptoms that cannot necessarily be mitigated with hospice care or a prescription, such as when your spouse informs you that, even though you are a brain surgeon, he is too depressed to leave the house and pick up the boys at school or walk the dog. Perhaps you’re not as understanding as you should be, seeing as marriage to a female brain surgeon is like winning the devotion of a unicorn. Instead of him telling you that he won’t be able to attend the parent-teacher conference, you should be telling him that you won’t be able to attend the parent-teacher conference. You should not be the one to clean up golden retriever feces off the kitchen floor.

WHAT ARE THE COMPLICATIONS THAT CAN OCCUR FROM A CRANIOTOMY?

Ability to understand language but not to speak. Ability to speak but not understand language. You might become the relative who throws the turkey at holiday dinners. At least it’s not as bad as trephination. Doctors in the Dark Ages used to create burr holes to relieve pressure or remove mental illness, meaning you’d have a permanent open wound in your head, but when they were done, they let patients keep the round piece of bone. Men and women wore the bone around their necks as a charm to ward off evil spirits. I bet it also came in useful for scaring the hell out of one’s nephews.

The worst complication I know of is when an ENT stuck a probe up a patient’s nose and punctured the blood-brain barrier because it was unusually low. Each time the patient took a breath, oxygen siphoned into his cranium and couldn’t escape until he herniated his brain into the vertebral canal. There lurk beastlier medical boogeymen, such as super-gonorrhea or the strain of MRSA resistant to known antibiotics. Eventually, you may not be able to get a rhinoplasty for fear of dying from a staph infection.

If that was blunt, that is because I have been dulled. Today, I had an emergency surgery on a senator for an arteriovenous malformation (a congenital tangle of blood vessels—a Gordian knot of gray matter) who could shut us down based on his demands for Medicare cuts, then got dragged to the emergency room for a thoracic burst fracture, and meanwhile I’m buzzed nonstop with requests for consults. I’m also forced to fetch my own fresh frozen plasma. On top of it all, I drew the short straw to write this FAQ page for our website because, our director said, we want it to have that personal touch. Now that I am single, I’m also the sole guardian at home (or not at home) responsible for getting a couple of adolescent boys who are both flunking math to stop watching porn or playing video games and do their homework. My apologies if my bedside manner comes across more Groucho Marx than Mother Teresa.