The Authority of Suffering

Well, hello.  You may be wondering about this blog, who I am, and why I would write on such an unpleasant topic like suffering.


My name is Dr. Tim Moore, and I am a practicing Cardiovascular Surgeon in Leesburg, Florida.  I have been a practicing heart surgeon for nearly twenty years.  You can see my profile below.  I am a Christian heart surgeon and author of the book, Surviving the Suffering, due out next summer.


What makes me an authority on suffering?  Well, first of all, my job is to cause people to suffer.  Each weekday morning at about 7:00 am I take a scalpel to someone's chest and perform heart surgery on them.  This alone is good enough for some short term suffering.  Although I am inflicting pain on my patients, it is for their greater good, and to ultimately relieve even worse suffering from a heart attack or heart failure.


Secondly, my patients' families suffer alongside their loved ones as they recover from surgery.  And on rare occasions, when someone doesn't make it through open-heart surgery, they suffer from the loss of their family member. And I suffer some with them as well.


Patients don't always realize it, but many of the people caring for them have suffered or are suffering.  I see that too, in my colleagues and co-workers and in all the many people that make up our open-heart team. Just like everyone else, we have team members who get ill or lose loved ones.


Finally, I have done a bit of suffering myself.  I was born with respiratory failure and required a tracheostomy as an infant.  I was hopitalized around seventy-five to a hundred times growing up and eventually had to have part of a lung removed.  In addition to my chest surgery as a child, I have had two abdominal operations as an adult. 


By no means is my defintion of suffering restricted to illnesses and surgery.  In my future posts I will explore a variety of different forms of suffering, with the most important message being that all suffering is not the same.  It is when we fail to diagnose the form of suffering that afflicts us that we do the wrong things that make our suffering worse.  Hopefully we can find a better way of surviving the suffering.