Interlude - Becoming

[MUSIC] Hi everyone, JP here. I want to take a moment to pause along with all of you listening to reflect on the conversations we've shared in this first season of the neurosurgery podcast. Conversations which have been a privilege and a pleasure for me, and I hope something approaching entertainment or even education for you. As I consider these conversations, I was struck by a common vein running through the season despite the variety of guests, styles, and subjects we've had on the show. Whether it's building up your endurance for a 24-mile run or a 24-hour operation, painstakingly establishing a culture among your OR team or your residents and APPs, or the brutal art of slowly and sometimes cruelly, transforming new generations into Lex and personalities from those of young, inexperienced doctors into hardened, elite neurosurgeons. I believe that our guests have all pointed toward one key aspect of life in neurosurgery, becoming. You see, no one books marathon cases on their first day of practice. No, they continue to learn and grow until they're ready for it. No group forms within a 19 dynamic, they make that culture together. No one just shows up to run an iron man, they train exhaustively for it. And I don't think anyone comes to neurosurgery with the diamond-hard personality required to face the miserable lows and the ecstatic highs in this field, without psychological compromise. No, we're all supported by those who went before us. So to anyone listening at whatever stage of life or your career, I believe that we're all always becoming. From college students aspiring to medical school, soon to be physicians losing sleep over the match, in turns thrown subtly into a new world of responsibility, senior residents facing life without a safety net, junior attendants trying to rise within their institutions without compromising patient care, and older neurosurgeons now wondering at their legacy. This cycle never ends. So when the growing pains inherent to each step in this process may threaten to destroy you, I say never be daunting. Remember that your seniors, the attendings that you idolize, the residents you harass, even those names and books so old that you only know them as surgical instruments. They all got their step-by-step, just like all of us. See, I think we're all fellow travelers working down that same road at different stages, haltingly, painfully, but inevitably becoming. [Music]