He was my first solo case — a five-year-old boy clinging to life on the operating table. Two decades later, he found me in a hospital parking lot and accused me of ruining everything.
Back when this all began, I was 33 and freshly minted as an attending in cardiothoracic surgery. I never thought the same boy I helped would reappear in my life in the craziest way. The kind of work I did was not general surgery — this was the terrifying world of hearts, lungs, and great vessels — life or death.
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