Miles O’Brien, a CNN correspondent and his life changing injury – From Sanjay Gupta

Medicine is all about rules and patterns. Doctors see symptoms, carries out tests leading to diagnosis.

Doctors go to medical school to learn and be trained on these patterns although the ease of learning through pattern is not always come in handy. Patterns get broken, out of the ordinary things happen and when it does then following what doctors have learned from patterns can hamper the needs of patient in the crisis.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta, chief medical correspondent shares the story of his old friend and colleague former CNN correspondent, Miles O’Brien who has suffered an injury which ended up in losing his left arm once and for all.

Miles was working on a story in Philippines when an equipment case had fallen on his left arm. Within 48 hours the injury took a turn so bad that his arm had to be amputated as he had developed Acute Compartment Syndrome.

Before undergoing his operation and being under general anesthesia he could not imagine ever waking up to find that he is no more the same, at least physically. In the couple of hours of undergoing surgery, surgeons understood that they would have to amputate his arms to save his life.

Sanjay has known Miles for 14 years. Miles was gracious to him when Sanjay started off at CNN. Every time he reported on space, Sanjay learned something or the other from him. Their friendship grew with time as they covered wars and natural disasters together, Hurricane Katrina to name one. They even joked together that Miles was the rocket scientist Sanjay the brain surgeon of CNN.

Sanjay was shook up after hearing about the injury. Moments after he woke up his brain was still trying to register what had happened. Sanjay could not help but cry when Miles told him that he breathed a sigh of relief when he woke up from his surgery only to realize that a part of him was gone. It was astonishing for me that he still stayed back in Philippines and kept on working on his stories and did not tell a soul, not even his bosses. Miles grieved but within days he went back to work, whether he was working out of denial or acceptance one will never know. Breaking rules already just like a real reporter does.

The months following his amputation, his behavior varied insanely between denial then to acceptance and then reversed into depression. At times, it seemed he was going at the pace of a thousand miles an hour and then suddenly he would get irritated and even angry.

Grief has no patterns no rules and no regulations. Each of us deal with differently because each of had suffered some kind of loss, life lessons and mental strength teach us how to deal with it but still sometimes it is not in our control.

That is the grieving story of Miles, who still has not given up and hopefully never will.