Operating Through Loss

By: Wissam Benhami

Content Note: This post contains discussion of pregnancy loss, a topic that may be difficult for some readers.

It was a Thursday afternoon when I walked out of the OR and drove straight to my gynecologist. The room was quiet and I let myself believe this was just another routine visit. My mind was already on the weekend ahead. He shifted the probe once, twice, and finally stopped. His voice was quiet, almost apologetic. There was no heartbeat. I nodded as he spoke, but his words dissolved before they reached me. I left the office with the image burned into my mind, a still, motionless curve on the screen and a weight in my body that felt both heavy and hollow.

The next morning was Friday. A patient we had operated on the day before needed her discharge. I hadn’t slept a single hour. My eyes were swollen and red, and when people asked, I mumbled something about allergies. The truth was too raw to offer. I stepped into her room, holding her chart, my voice steady as I explained the wound care, the medications, the signs to watch for. She smiled, reassured. I smiled back. In that moment, my grief didn’t matter. What mattered was that she felt safe enough to go home.

That weekend bled into a week— I went on operating, day after day, knowing my own body was carrying a pregnancy that had already ended, waiting for it to let go. Between cases, I sometimes caught myself watching patients in small, ordinary moments, a daughter adjusting her mother’s blanket, a man holding his wife’s hand while she drifted off to sleep. I noticed the way they protected each other, and I thought about how I had spent that week protecting everyone who came under my care, shielding them from uncertainty, from pain, I can keep everyone else safe. Why couldn’t I keep my own child safe?

Surgeons are often imagined as invulnerable, decisive, composed, precise, and we are, but we are also human. We carry the weight of our patients’ pain alongside our own. Sometimes we show up to the operating room with hearts that are breaking. We keep going, not because it is easy, but because our patients need us to.

I think often of that Friday morning, how I stood by my patient’s bed explaining wound care while my own wound was invisible. I think of the thousands of surgeons, especially women, who return to work after a miscarriage, a loss, or any deeply personal pain, and keep giving the best of themselves to others.

This is not resilience in the glossy, motivational sense. It is quiet endurance. It is the choice to keep showing up, to keep healing, even when healing yourself feels impossible. Our patients rarely know the battles we fight outside the hospital walls, and maybe they don’t need to. I believe our humanity, our ability to care despite the cost is what makes us not only better surgeons, but better people.

Author Bio: Wissam Benhami, MD, is a general surgeon who recently graduated from Université d’Alger, currently working at Clinique Les Orangers, an oncologic surgery clinic in Algiers. She dreams of specializing one day in hepato-biliary and pancreatic surgery. In her free time, Wissam enjoys working out, practicing Pilates, reading romance novels or self-development books, playing with her cat Olivia, and cooking indulgent meals for her husband, her love language.