\n<\/p>\n
E<\/span>arly on in Confessions of a Brain Surgeon, a crew member pipes up from behind the camera. Would Henry Marsh mind saying something, anything, to see if the microphones are working? \u201cWhen, in disgrace with fortune and men\u2019s eyes,\u201d Marsh says instantly, not pausing for a moment to gather the words, \u201cI all alone beweep my outcast state, and trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, and look upon myself and curse my fate.\u201d A simple \u201ctesting testing, one two\u201d would be standard practice, but Marsh is not your standard documentary subject.<\/p>\n Marsh is a retired neurosurgeon, having spent decades at the top of his profession. You\u2019ve probably seen hospital documentaries that have featured an \u201cawake craniotomy\u201d, the macabre procedure that keeps a patient with a sawn-open skull conscious, so the effect of the scalpel\u2019s cuts can be monitored in real time. Marsh, along with his longterm colleague, anaesthetist Judith Dinsmore, pioneered that. He performed numerous other exceptionally advanced operations with unique skill. Countless patients who were told by less able, less imaginative medics that they were terminally ill were treated successfully by Marsh.<\/p>\n At 75, Marsh is physically and mentally agile, but his own diagnosis of prostate cancer has caused him to reflect. In Charlie Russell and Harriet Bird\u2019s exquisite film, he reviews diaries and home movie footage, and meets important people from his past.<\/p>\n So how does this man, the one with Shakespeare sonnets ready on his tongue, feel to have been the best at the vocation we use as shorthand for the world\u2019s hardest job? \u201cAll surgeons carry inside themselves an inner cemetery,\u201d he says. \u201cA place full of bitterness and regret.\u201d Every professional lifesaver is haunted by the people they were unable to help, but Marsh is so troubled by the relatively few patients who died on his table that he can\u2019t take pleasure in his many successes. He struggles even to remember them.<\/p>\n Confessions of a Brain Surgeon is his quest to rectify that, and make peace with himself. The result, powered by Marsh\u2019s pitiless acuity and disarming eccentricity, is a deep meditation on what it means to have lived: death hands us a ledger of triumphs and mistakes, the happiness we\u2019ve spread tallied against the pain we\u2019ve inflicted. Was it all worth it?<\/p>\n Marsh remembers a 16-year-old girl who had a life-altering stroke after her operation. He remembers patients who did not survive at all. Reviewing his trips to Ukraine, which he has visited regularly as a volunteer since 1992, he finds footage of Tania, a girl he brought back to London but could not cure. \u201cI look at this with complete horror,\u201d he says, peering through the thick, round spectacles that enhance his hawkish gaze. \u201cHorror\u201d is the word he uses most often.<\/p>\n With the help of his first wife, Hilary, Marsh also looks back at the negative effect his calling had on his personal life. Was he a workaholic who sacrificed his family\u2019s happiness to drive himself forward? Yes, but as with seemingly everything in Marsh\u2019s life, matters had a cruelly precise balance and inevitability to them. He chose to train as a neurosurgeon after his first child, William, became seriously ill at the age of three months. The baby recovered after a successful brain operation but the ordeal was, Marsh says, \u201chorror beyond horror\u201d.<\/p>\n An already piercingly emotional documentary shifts up a gear during Marsh\u2019s meeting with a woman named Tina. Almost thirty years ago, Tina\u2019s four-year-old son Max had a brain tumour, and Marsh said he could fix it. He was wrong. In a stunningly frank exchange, Tina admits that she has carried a hatred for Marsh ever since Max died; Marsh admits that he misdiagnosed the type of tumour Max had \u201cbecause I was arrogant\u201d. But then Tina lets go and forgives, for the simple reason that Marsh has full recall of the case: he remembered her little Max. Suddenly this brusque scientist leans across the table and grasps both Tina\u2019s trembling hands. \u201cOf course I remembered.\u201d<\/p>\n Further redemption comes from reunions with Dinsmore, the anaesthetist, who reminds Marsh of the great work they did; and his long-serving secretary Gail, who says it was an honour to assist him. Then there is an old patient, Jude, who was a new mum in 2002 when she was told by doctors that her tumour was inoperable. Marsh disagreed; Jude recently saw her son graduate. In her house, Marsh is shown a wall of family photos, each memory a gift bestowed by the dedication that has brought him unimaginable anguish. Was it all worth it? The film ends with Marsh still weighing the evidence, but we\u2019re given reason to hope that his answer will be yes.<\/p>\n Confessions of a Brain Surgeon aired on BBC Two and is on iPlayer now<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Early on in Confessions of a Brain Surgeon, a crew member pipes up from behind the camera. Would Henry Marsh mind saying something, anything, to see if the microphones are working? \u201cWhen, in disgrace with fortune and men\u2019s eyes,\u201d Marsh says instantly, not pausing for a moment to gather the words, \u201cI all alone beweep<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16519,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[2121,9856,9764,9858,1085,9857,1779],"class_list":{"0":"post-16518","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-brain","9":"tag-confessions","10":"tag-exquisite","11":"tag-lifechangingly","12":"tag-review","13":"tag-surgeon","14":"tag-television"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16518"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16518\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/16519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}