12/26/2025
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1BzQC1ZnNu/ How many of us in the helping and healthcare professions have felt the burnout and frustrations that this surgeon describes? We try to do the right thing, even as health insurance companies, supervisors, and politicians try to stand in our way. And yet, we continue to work tirelessly to help people. And I'll bet there are a fair amount of us who could find inspiration and support from our beloved pets, who, we know, have far more insight and intelligence than many humans. An inspiring story for the New Year. See if you agree.
They say a surgeon’s hands must be cold to be steady. But that night, staring at a catastrophic abdominal rupture that defined "inoperable," my hands weren't just cold—they were frozen with fear. To save him, I didn't need a medical miracle; I needed a predator.
I am a Trauma attending at Metro General, a massive concrete fortress in the heart of the city that catches everything the world throws away. I’ve cracked chests open in hallways and held arteries shut with my bare fingers. I know the human anatomy better than I know my own mortgage paperwork. But nothing prepares you for the nights when the system decides a life isn't worth the inventory cost of the blood bags.
The patient was Mateo. Twenty-two years old. A "Dreamer." He worked off-the-books construction because that’s the only work that doesn’t ask for papers. A prefabricated concrete slab had snapped a cable and pinned him against a girder. By the time they wheeled him into my bay, he was more ghost than boy. His pelvis was shattered dust, and his abdominal aorta—the main pipeline of life—was a ticking time bomb, held together by nothing but fragile connective tissue and prayer.
"Dr. Vance," the surgical administrator said, standing in the doorway of the trauma bay. He wasn’t a bad man, just a man whose soul had been eaten by spreadsheets. "His vitals are crashing. He has no insurance, no next of kin listed. If you open him up and he dies on the table, it’s a mortality statistic we can’t afford right now. Stabilize and transfer."
Transfer meant death. We both knew it. Mateo looked at me. He couldn’t speak—the tube was already down his throat—but his eyes were wide, dark, and terrified. He was gripping the rail of the gurney so hard his knuckles were white. He didn’t want to die. He was just a kid who wanted to build things.
I looked at the X-rays. It was a mess. A jagged map of impossibility. My logical brain, the one trained at Harvard and hardened in the residency pits, screamed: Walk away. It’s futile. You can’t fix this.
I went to the scrub sink. I turned the water on, scalding hot. I stared at the stainless steel, feeling utterly hollow. I was burnt out. I was tired of fighting insurance companies for permission to save lives. I was tired of the violence, the poverty, the sheer weight of American disparity pressing down on my OR table. I closed my eyes, and for a second, I wasn't in the hospital.
I was in my living room.
I saw Jericho.
Jericho isn’t a Golden Retriever who fetches slippers. He is a Catahoula Leopard Dog, the state dog of Louisiana, bred to hunt wild boars in the swamps. I found him three years ago, half-starved, limping along a highway divider in the rain, ribs showing through a coat that looked like spilled gray paint and black ink.
Jericho doesn’t beg. He doesn’t plead. He endures. He has eyes of glass—one ice blue, one amber—that look right through your excuses. He is independent, stubborn, and possesses a grit that most humans have forgotten. When I come home after losing a patient, reeking of failure and antiseptic, he doesn’t offer pity. He just leans his ninety pounds of solid muscle against my leg and sits there, a silent sentinel. His message is always the same: We are here. We are breathing. Stand up.
Standing at that scrub sink, my hands shaking, I summoned him.
"Jericho," I whispered to the empty room. "I can’t do this. I’m too scared."
In my mind’s eye, I saw him lock onto a target. A Catahoula doesn’t hesitate. When they are on the hunt, the world narrows down to a single point. Fear is irrelevant. Pain is background noise. There is only the objective. It is a state of pure, animalistic flow.
I looked back at the X-ray. I stopped seeing the politics. I stopped seeing the insurance forms. I stopped seeing the "Dreamer" label that divided the country. I saw a broken vessel that needed to be clamped.
"I’m lending you my hands," I thought, picturing those amber eyes. "You give me the gut. You give me the instinct. Don't let me overthink this."
I walked back into the OR. The room was chaotic, nurses shouting out dropping pressures.
"We’re not transferring," I said. My voice sounded different. Lower. Rougher. "Prep for a midline laparotomy. Open the massive transfusion protocol. Now."
The administrator started to protest. "Sarah, you can’t—"
"Get out," I said, not looking at him. "Or scrub in."
The next four hours were a blur. It wasn't surgery; it was a war of attrition. When I opened Mateo up, it was worse than the scans showed. The bleeding was torrential. Normally, my heart rate would spike. I would second-guess my angles.
But not tonight.
A strange, cold calm settled over me. It was the silence of the swamp before the strike. I wasn't thinking about anatomy textbooks. My hands were moving on their own, driven by a primal intelligence. Clamp here. Suturing now. Faster.
At the critical moment, the aorta threatened to tear completely. A millimeter of error meant death. My assistant froze. "Dr. Vance, the tissue is friable, it's going to shred."
I didn't blink. I felt a phantom weight against my leg—the grounding presence of Jericho. I didn't see the fragile tissue; I saw the line that needed to be held. I threw a stitch that I had never practiced, a risky, impossible maneuver to anchor the graft. It was aggressive. It was wild. It was something a machine would never calculate.
It held.
The bleeding stopped. The suction cleared the field. The red river became a manageable stream, then a dry bed.
"Pressure is normalizing," the anesthesiologist whispered, his voice cracking with disbelief. "Pulse is strong."
I finished the closure in silence. I didn't feel triumph. I felt the heavy, panting exhaustion of a long hunt. When I stripped off my gown, my scrubs were soaked through with sweat. I looked at Mateo’s face, now pink with returning circulation. He was going to make it. He was going to build skyscrapers again.
I walked out to the waiting room. It was empty. No family. Just the janitor buffing the floor. The administrator was there, looking at his tablet. He looked up at me, stunned.
"How?" he asked. "That was... I've never seen anyone move that fast."
"I didn't do it alone," I said.
He looked around, confused. "Who assisted?"
"A specialist in survival," I muttered.
I drove home in the gray light of dawn. The city was waking up, oblivious to the battles fought in its sterile rooms. When I unlocked my apartment door, the apartment was silent.
Jericho was there. He was sitting by the window, watching the street. As soon as I entered, he stood up. He didn't jump on me. He walked over slowly, his nails clicking on the hardwood—a rhythm I knew better than my own heartbeat.
He looked at me with those mismatched, ancient eyes. He sniffed my hand, smelling the latex and the iodine and the faint metallic scent of a war won. He let out a short, sharp huff of breath, leaning his heavy head against my thigh.
I slid down the wall and sat on the floor, burying my face in his merle coat. I cried then. Not for the stress, but for the clarity.
We live in a world obsessed with credentials, status, and safety nets. We build systems so complex they forget how to care. We politicize existence until a dying boy becomes a liability on a spreadsheet. But in that operating room, civilization didn't save Mateo. Civilization wanted him gone.
What saved him was something older. It was the spirit of the pack. The refusal to leave one of your own behind. The instinct that says life is worth fighting for, simply because it is life.
Jericho licked the tears off my cheek. He didn't know he was a hero. He was just a dog. But looking at him, I realized that maybe we’ve been looking for role models in all the wrong places. We look to politicians, billionaires, and influencers for guidance, while the greatest lessons in loyalty and courage are sleeping on the rug at our feet.
Sometimes, to be a better human, you have to tap into the part of you that isn't human at all. You have to stop calculating the odds, dig your claws into the earth, and refuse to let go.
