Fear is your superpower

Lessons from the operating room on anxiety, fear, and falling in love with failure

My hands look steady. They place each suture where it’s supposed to go. They thankfully don’t betray me when the scrub nurse puts scissors in them.

Inside, my chest is crushed in a vice. My breathing is shallow. And my brain roils worse than a ship in the Bay of Biscay.

“What if you can’t do this?” my brain asks me, the patient’s face literally wide open in front of me. “You know what, never mind. You know you can’t do this. Your repair is just going to break down, your reconstruction is bound to fail, and then what? You’re screwed. He’s screwed.

“You shouldn’t be here.”

I know that voice. I know this feeling. I’ve written a lot about the fact that I live with anxiety, my jagged traveling companion. And this—the racing heart, the shallow breathing, the catastrophic thinking? He’s back.

And worse. He’s got a point.

Let’s back up.

A few years ago, I met Sebastian (not his real name). He had a tumor on his jaw that I had taken out. I’d replaced the diseased mandible with a metal plate, rotated some…