A Heart in Hand IV

Choices that hurt  

(If you missed the beginning of the story, you can read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 right here)


"I need space, I need time for myself," I said.

He looked at me with his puppy eyes. What have I done wrong? What can I do, is there a way to make it better? I can be better.

"You have done nothing wrong. But I think this is the best decision right now, and I think we need time apart from each other."

"It is Amanda, right?" said Alex. "Amanda and I are just friends and nothing more. She was just dropping something off at the pathology lab and needed my guidance on filling out the forms."

I nodded and said it was okay. It is not her. It is not her fault. We are all fighting for the man. Everyone knows what is good.


As I was walking away, I could feel his eyes following me. I asked myself if he was crying, or just mad, or felt completely blindsided. Would mentioning Amanda have made it worse? Because it is like knowing that is the reason and you are trying to justify it without actually admitting it.

Somewhere in between the end of the surgery and dictating the surgical notes, I had sent an almost-breakup text to Jeff. Is a text message the most cowardly way to break up with someone? But here I am almost doing the same thing. What are even the worst ways to break up with someone? I asked myself. The worst would probably be on the wedding day, but I am too good for that. There goes the writer in me. Trying to make up an alternative ending to an already life-altering event ending anyway. At least we are not celebrities whose relationships are made public. And I had not put out any music asking where my husband was. So the message was simple: we talk after the first case.

 

A heart in hand III

Emergency Sternotomy

(If you missed the beginning of the story, you can read Part 1  and Part 2 right here)

I am a babymama and a heart surgeon.

The first part of my life I try to hide. No one at my workplace knows that I even have a child. I was one of those high school romances where you are stupidly in love and not thinking of the consequences.

I got lucky, because my parents were ready to cover it up for me. My mother took her as her own baby, and everyone thought she was my little sister—a beautiful new addition. With this illusion, I was able to complete high school and move on to medical school. I don't know if one can call it bad luck in good luck, because the father is in a totally different country. Since this is a secret unknown to many, let me keep it safe and enjoy being a babymama in peace. After all, the arrangement was that he also leaves me in peace. Still, it is not much of a secret if I am telling you all the juicy details now. I don't know how to say this, but I feel like if I say it out loud, I am putting myself out there as less of a mother. Sometimes I feel like I haven't even earned the title of mother because other people did the heavy lifting so that I could be the heart surgeon I am today. I don't know if other people relate to this or if I am thinking way too much about things that no one is even looking into.

 

Fire on the Screen, Quiet in the Halls: What the World Cup Taught Me About the Neuroscience of Hope

An elderly patient stopped a nurse in our hallway last week, slowly dragging his heavy metal IV pole behind him. The wheels made a rhythmic, clicking sound against the sterile floor. He looked entirely worn down by days of aggressive medical tests, constant blood draws, and the quiet anxiety that settles in when a human body begins to face its own vulnerability. But as he looked up, he had just one urgent question: "Where is the scoreboard for the World Cup?"

Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash

 

The nurse smiled, took the side of his pole, and walked him down the hall to a public wall near the breakroom. There, the night shift staff had pinned up a large, hand-drawn paper bracket of the tournament. The old man adjusted his thick glasses, stepped close to the paper, and stood there for a remarkably long time. Watching him trace the names of the countries with a trembling finger, checking the updated scores, it hit me that this wasn't mere entertainment. It was a touchstone. In a massive, sterile building that reminded him constantly of his physical limitations, that paper bracket was proof that a vibrant world still existed outside his room, and that he was still a part of it.

Standing at the nursing station, I realized I understood his longing far more than I expected to. In medicine, hope is rarely just a warm, abstract feeling—it functions closer to a precision clinical tool. We hope a complex surgical suture stays intact under immense pressure. We hope a bypass blood vessel does not leak. We hope a patient wakes up from an induced coma after major surgery with no neurological deficits. We hope the exhausting, rhythmic chest compressions of a resuscitation code bring a pulse back onto the monitor before the door to life clicks shut. Hope occupies a heavy, very specific space in hospital corridors, built entirely on a profound uncertainty that we cannot resolve except by waiting.

But watching the tournament play out on the ward’s television screens,

Fire on Ice: The Erratic Dance of the Cold and Heatwave

 00:00. It poured.

The cinematic clash of elements: Fire on ice

That is what I scribbled into my journal entries. After weeks of being absolutely roasted by the summer heatwave—a chaotic experience I recently vented about right here—I had essentially transformed into a full-time weather reporter, ready to share my eureka moments with the masses. Finally getting this rain felt like receiving an early Christmas gift, or hearing a beautiful song written entirely in your name. It was a daydream that never ends.

It was so intensely expected that when the sky poured down the drops, it was the ultimate "speak of the devil" moment.

A heart in Hand II

The Summer Cupid

(If you missed the beginning of the story, you can read Part 1 right here)

“What would you like to order together?” the waiter asked.

“We are not together,” I replied quickly.

Just a minute prior, I had set my bag down on an empty chair to rummage for something stuck at the very bottom. It was summer, the only time of year the restaurant moved its tables and chairs out onto the sidewalk. If it hadn’t been for the warm weather, those outdoor chairs wouldn't have been there, and our paths never would have crossed. But they did. The man sitting at the table next to my bag used the moment to introduce himself. Before I left, he asked for my contact information. I gave him my Instagram handle, assuming nothing would come of it, and he headed back to work. That was our meet-cute, and the waiter was our unexpected Cupid. Thank God for summer. 

The mechanics of Happiness

The trumpet sounds, highlighting the end of the world.

Or at least, that is what his mind decided in a split second of absolute terror. There he was, sitting in the bathtub in the middle of a quiet afternoon, completely buried under a mountain of white bubble foam. Without warning, it all went black. It wasn’t the slow, natural fade of a late evening, but a sudden, violent, suffocating darkness.

Panic hit him like a physical blow. I am too young, he thought, his heart hammering against his ribs. Please, not now. Can the end times be moved just a little further down the road? When I am old? When I have actually achieved my dreams in life?

Growing up, this was exactly how the final hour had always been described: there would be no warning, no grand announcement. A single celestial trumpet would shatter the sky, and the righteous would simply vanish, lifted up into the ether.

He sat frozen in the pitch-black bathroom, covered in soap, waiting for the reckoning. Then, after roughly ten minutes of agonizing existential solitude in the dark, a voice shattered the silence from down the hallway: "Hurry up and come for dinner!"

His mother.

It turns out it wasn't the rapture; it was just a blown fuse. What an out-of-this-world experience. That is precisely what happens when someone watches too many apocalyptic movies—the imagination hijacks reality, and a person starts inventing the end of days over a bar of soap.

Yet, long after the lights clicked back on and the adrenaline faded, the question refused to leave him. What if it had truly been the end? What would I have actually done with my life? A quiet, stubborn voice inside him answered: I need to follow my dreams. But as he sat there, looking at the ordinary architecture of his current life, a much heavier question began to pound: Am I even happy right now? What is happiness, and how can one be authentically happy?

Whether you are currently rewriting marketing history or simply going about your daily lab job unnoticed by the world, happiness remains an entirely internal definition. The grand illusion of modern society dictates that the keys to joy are wealth and fame. We are told to push harder, run faster, and accumulate more. But the true mechanics of happiness are entirely in your own control. The working formula is completely unique to you. You are the engineer of your own internal engine—you determine exactly how it spins, the speed with which it rotates, and the momentum it carries.

The truth is, humans are remarkably adaptable creatures. We get used to our circumstances, no matter how chaotic or mundane, and we instinctively find a way to discover the small, quiet joys of life within them. We learn to accept things. More importantly, we learn not to let our immediate circumstances define who we are or who we become. We don't get to live life twice, so why spend the majority of the time in discontent?

Image source: Unsplash

Whenever you find yourself slipping into that dangerous cycle of complaining, ponder the beautiful, grounding perspective shared by Sue Ann Goh:

Shaping Tomorrow: Are We Building Our Cities the Right Way? An Invitation to Discuss the Future of Real Estate

 When I first closely studied a city blueprint – those intricate maps dictating where schools, supermarkets, residential zones, shopping facilities, doctors, and pharmacies should ideally be within walking distance – I was utterly fascinated. For hours, I'd pore over the details, lost in the logic of planned communities.

Yet, a stark reality often strikes me: in many of our cities, this ideal planning is far from achieved. Buildings spring up, seemingly at random, and infrastructure like roads has to be shoehorned in retrospectively. It often feels like one problem simply gives birth to the next.

I've often found myself wondering: Is it truly feasible to build underground subways in already developed areas? Would we need to demolish existing structures, compensating owners? Who would ever be okay with their home being destroyed, and where would they live? These are fundamental, weighty questions that demand thoughtful answers.

 

A Journey Through Urban Perspectives

Years later, sitting in an urban planning seminar, tasked with critiquing buildings and their surroundings, my observations continued. "Yes, this area lacks sufficient green spaces, it's rather overcrowded." I pondered: are towering skyscrapers and additional subways, on top of our existing transport networks, genuinely the optimal path forward?

This tension between rigid structure and natural flow always makes me think of the legendary architect Zaha Hadid. When she first broke onto the scene, people widely believed her fluid, radical urban visions were completely impossible to build. Critics wanted the short way out—the standard, predictable linear grid. But she firmly believed that buildings shouldn't just be box-shaped blocks, and she famously refused to draw straight lines. You can see this absolute defiance of the box in her masterpiece, the Heydar Aliyev Center, where the walls, floors, and roof melt into a single, breathtaking white wave. Her courage proved that these sweeping, organic ideas could physically exist in our real world, showing that architecture can bend to serve human imagination rather than forcing us to live inside rigid, soul-crushing concrete boxes.

Zaha Hadid's masterpiece: The Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku. (Photo: Azerbaijan.travel)

Then, a course on Gender Perspectives on Urban Development shifted my entire outlook. I began to view my surroundings through a completely different lens. My focus moved to the basics: Where are the accessible walkways and pavements for strollers? Are there enough safe playgrounds for children? Are there convenient seating areas for mothers to rest after a long walk? Where are the community gardens where families can enjoy picnics? And how do we ensure universal access to clean, safe water?

Boredom: the Mother of Creativity

I read an article recently about how social interaction helps us to function at our very best. Our minds are built to connect, to talk, and to share.

But imagine for a second if it all went quiet. Imagine a world where you are just hearing the birds whispering and the oceans clashing; the steady dribbling of the water droplets, the quiet ballet of the falling leaves, the sudden whoosh of a blowing wind.

Imagine there was no music, no movies, no social media—nothing.

We would still find a way to entertain ourselves. We always do. I believe entertainment is out way of escaping that heavy, natural silence. But here is the thing: When the silence starts speaking, the ideas begin to flow. And when we create something to escape boredom, we end up building the exact bridge we need to connect with each other.

It is a full circle moment. We need social interaction to function, boredom forces us to create culture and that culture gives us the very things we need to communicate and interact.

Think about it. It is this desperate need to bridge the gap between us that makes us build human culture. We created Easter and Christmas traditions, beauty pageants like Miss World and Miss Universe. We created wrestling, reality TV, news and gossip, the Dr. Phil Show, City Marathons, and endless series.



Image source: magnific.com




We come home after a long day of work and put on a movie or a favorite episode. And what do we do the next morning? We talk about it. The entertainment dissolves the boredom, and then it feeds our social connection.

I once heard that because there was not so much entertainment in the past, that is why people gave birth a lot! It makes sense, right? People had to find a way to interact.

We make up things just to "happy ourselves" and give us reasons to gather. In winter, we have the Christmas Markets. In spring, the Spring Festival. In summer, we have open-air concerts. In autumn, we find Halloween and Thanksgiving. We are constantly inventing seasons of celebration so we don't have to face the quiet alone.

Some people make it their job to entertain us. And while it looks easy on the outside, it does not always. It takes immense work to turn a lonely thought into a shared reality.

-● A thought becomes an idea which beats a music that is sang years and years on.
-● A thought becomes a surgical step that is learnt decades on.
-● A thought becomes a book that is studied in schools for centuries.
-● An idea becomes a world-famous painting celebrated for years, like the Mona Lisa or a Michelangelo masterpiece.

These ideas live on for generations to profit from. Our thoughts lead to our passion, and our passion leads to the things that bring us together.

In a way, boredom is the director of the movie. He sees the vision from afar and directs the scene. We need boredom to step in. If we are always distracted, the director never gets to call "Action."

The poet Joseph Brodsky once wrote: "When hit by boredom, go for it. Let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom... the sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface." What would happen if we didn’t fear being bored? What if we let ourselves hit the bottom of the quiet, so we could surface with something new?

Like I always say, Ideas are Currency.