There is a lot of talk about “wellness” in today’s medicine. The idea is that we spend too much of our resources (read: money) on treating sick people and not enough to prevent disease in the first place. Even though I have spent my professional life treating people who need neurosurgery, I have to agree with the argument that often, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” This old saying is particularly relevant today as we struggle to push back the signs of aging. I love my older patients who are full of life. I always try and understand how they do it. Everybody has a different story, but a few constant threads are in every long and vibrant life. These patients all have a reason outside of their own happiness. In other words; they know their purpose. That is much of the reason for this site.

There was a feature on the airplane I recently flew on that I’d never seen. I guess it might have been there before, but I had never really noticed it. The seat in front of mine had a digital display noting our global location as we flew. This is really cool, because you can look out the window and try to pick out landmarks. But the thing I hadn’t noticed in the past was the temperature gauge. It read -63 degrees! This was remarkable to me because cosmologists (not the ladies that will give you a makeover, the real, live Carl Sagan types) tell us that a few degrees either way and our earth would be permanently frozen. Or so hot that the oceans would steam up and cause a permanent greenhouse effect, burning off all the water. And you don’t have to go up very far in the atmosphere to feel as if you are in Antarctica!

This week, I’ve been traveling to a medical meeting outside the country. The “Spine Arthroplasty Society” is being held in Montreal, Quebec. The city is beautiful and decidedly French. It’s so French they have a law requiring all outdoor signs be in French, and if they catch you with an outdoor sign in English, you get fined. By the language police. I’m not making this up! But what has struck me is that if you don’t speak the language of a country, you are at the mercy of the locals. You have to trust total strangers to be kind to you. And in my experience, they usually are very kind indeed. Why?

What does the term cone bring to mind? Ice cream? Maybe pinecones? What about those megaphones that the pep-squad used to use before they invented wireless mics? I think the cone is one of the most interesting shapes in creation, and lately I have viewed them through a new lens.

With the onset of spring in East Texas comes both beauty and misery. Like so much of life, along with the beautiful comes some ugly. Roses have thorns, plants have allergy-producing pollen, and with the warmer weather we have mosquitoes. And far beyond just being a general nuisance, they can carry deadly diseases. We are taught in the Bible that death, disease, and suffering are a result of sin and our separation from God. I guess that means there were no mosquitoes in Eden!

I noticed something today while looking through the operating microscope that made me do a double take. We were working on a part of the dura (the covering of the brain) and looking at it under high magnification. We could see all of the magnificent detail magnified 10x. And there was a leaf. Not a real leaf, of course, but unmistakable nonetheless. As we focused in on it, and I moaned about not having a camera attachment, we could see it as newly formed blood vessels. There had been stress to the body at this site, and new blood vessels were forming to help with the repair. This happens as a natural part of the healing process, but I had never noticed the similarity to the most humble of creation, the leaf. Shown above is an example. One of the pictures shows the process of neovascularization in the brain; the other is a detail of a leaf. I think the part that amazes me most is that I’ve seen neovascularization tissue hundreds, maybe thousands of times. And the similarity is, well, striking. But I never made the connection before. It makes me wonder what else I’ve walked by!

Rocks. Ever notice ‘em? I confess, I’ve never quite understood how interesting they really can be. Steve, my high school buddy, was a true rock hound and a budding geologist. He had a big collection of all kinds of crystals, igneous rocks, and those weird rocks that look like an egg on the outside and have beautiful growing things inside. I think they are called geodes. Now Steve drills for oil in the Gulf of Mexico. His passion paid off!

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. Romans 1:20