EXCERPT from NY Times
Dr. Gawande said surgery appealed to him, in part, because he does not have the typical surgeon’s personality. “When I got in the O.R. as a resident, I found that I really liked it,” he said. “No. 1, I was attracted by the blood and guts. No. 2 was the sense of decision-making: there is uncertainty, but you have to make choices. I’ve always had a tendency to indecision. In the rest of my life I’m sort of a ditherer.”
Both his parents are physicians, he added — his father a urologist and his mother a pediatrician — and growing up in Athens, Ohio, he tried hard not to follow in their footsteps. “This idea that a bright Indian kid is supposed to be a doctor — I resisted that,” he said. “I wanted to be a rock star. I played guitar and wrote songs and even had a couple of club shows. I was just terrible.”
At Oxford he toyed with the idea of becoming a philosopher until he realized he didn’t have the knack for asking the right sort of philosophical questions, and so he wound up in medical school after all. “It turns out you can be a doctor and be almost anything,” he said. “Even a writer.”
“I now feel like writing is the most important thing I do. In some ways, it’s harder than surgery. But I do think I’ve found a theme in trying to understand failure and what it means in the world we live in, and how we can improve at what we do.”
