Can Anybody Help?

I have an interesting job.  I've been at it for a little over two years now and I have my ups and downs...good days and bad days, but overall I enjoy what I do and I believe that in the grand scheme of things, I help people.  To summarize my profession, I monitor peoples' brains, nerves, and spinal cords while they undergo surgeries that could be potentially harmful to these structures.  One of the difficulties in doing this is that the field is still fairly new and (like most of science, and life in general) there is much more to learn.  Occasionally, during a surgery, we'll notice something in our data / signals that looks wrong or different, without much of an explanation.  After much troubleshooting and communication with everyone else who could be adding to the problem, there is sometimes to resolution.  This can be very frustrating and lead to questions of confidence.  "Am I doing this right?  Did I place something incorrectly?  Did I not realize that this patient has some weird disease that is making all this stuff not work?"  From time to time this happens and their seems to be no explanation for these events.

Every year, the society that credentials for my field has an annual meeting where all the brilliant minds present their latest findings and talk about things they've seen over the past year.  These guys will present case studies where they saw something different from the norm and were able to understand what this difference meant and explain it to the surgeon, ultimately improving the patient's outcome.  This past year I was comforted when one of these big shot guys talked about a case that was very similar to one I had monitored.  I listened intently, taking notes, waiting to hear the answer to my problem.  The conclusion, however, was that he didn't have the answer.

To a degree, this was encouraging.  I mean, hey, this guy is pretty smart and he can't make sense of this stuff either.  It makes me fell a bit better until the reality sinks in.  The problem still isn't solved.  I'm almost worse off now, because I don't even have hope that somebody can help me fix this.  This means that it's up to me to figure it out.  Thankfully (for me and everyone else involved), since I'm not a doctor, life-altering (for he patient) decisions like this aren't handed to me to make in the OR.  But I see this happen all the time through other avenues of my life.

I look for one guy in his fifties or so that seems to have done life well...by this I mean he's still married, loves his wife, she loves him, his kids aren't currently in jail, nor do they resent him.  He's done well at his job without becoming a slave to it.  He's healthy, has a good group of male companions, and has gone through a lot of crap in life and has deal with it well.  He has all the answers.

While there are a lot of good men and good people out there, this guy obviously doesn't exist.  Comforting, in the fact that as I see my life's path diverge and head somewhere I never would have expected I realize that everyone's path in life seems to make these abrupt jogs.  However, this doesn't solve the problem of where I'm at, where I'm heading, and how to make it work how I'd like it to.


So what is the solution?  Or, rather, what is the point of this?  What are we to learn?  I think that is the key...what I'm supposed to learn.  That's truly the only "good" way to deal with the non-ideal scenarios we end up in through life.  Because true growth comes through learning, and I find that meaningful growth usually only comes through the hard types of learning...."learning the hard way".  These frustrations can be an incredible mercy...a miracle if we dare to call it such.  Having no answer for why things don't work gives me more motivation to figure out an answer than anything else.