Anthony Papagiannis
Thessaloniki, Greece

It is early morning on New Year’s Eve, and as I am about to get up from a good night’s sleep, I remember George.

There were three of us who had graduated together from the same high school class half a century ago and subsequently went into medicine. University admission was the first major milestone in our lives, the one that would define and shape our future. We had celebrated the occasion, along with three other classmates who had gone into engineering, with a sumptuous meal and a generous libation of red wine. We embarked on our studies with the zeal of youth, dreaming about our specialties. Eventually, one of us chose psychiatry (or maybe psychiatry chose him), and I went for internal medicine, later focusing on pulmonology. By the beginning of the third year, George had declared his intent to pursue surgery. “I want to do something more than just palpate abdomens,” he used to say.

It was another New Year’s Eve back in 1976, when the youth choir to which I then belonged set out for a concert tour around Greece. We had a great time and enjoyed the singing and the hospitality provided in several cities. A few days later, we were on our return trip home. It was a long coach ride, and following the New Year abstinence from world affairs, I was engrossed in a days-old newspaper. As I was idly perusing the first page, my eyes caught a grim headline: “Med student collapses and dies at home.” As there had been similar occasions in the past, I looked for the details thinking, “Poor fellow!” when I realized with a nasty jolt that I was reading about George. Apparently, he had died while shaving on the very morning we had started our tour.

I spent the rest of the trip with a heavy heart. On arriving home, I sought our mutual friend to find out what had happened. “I rang your home and was told you had left, and I did not want to spoil your enjoyment,” he said. Cell phones did not exist in those days, which was a blessing. As I learned, the postmortem had disclosed a previously unknown heart defect that had proved fatal. With the exception of our elderly grandparents, this was our first close brush with the reality of death.

Now, five decades later and approaching retirement—my psychiatrist colleague has already given up his clinical duties for good—I try to imagine what sort of surgeon George would have been. And every New Year’s Eve I wake up remembering his face. May he rest in peace.