The promise a doctor made about her son's memory that turned out to be true only for him

In the waiting room before her son's surgery, surrounded by toy stethoscopes and toy syringes, Eula Biss asked the anesthesiologist if she could stay with her son while he was put under and while he came back to consciousness. He stiffened. Studies had shown, he told her, that an anxious mother's face and body language could make a child more afraid of surgery and more resistant to anesthesia. They argued in low voices while her husband and son bandaged each other's arms with toy supplies across the room. Eventually they struck a compromise: she could hold her son's hand while he went under, as long as she positioned herself so he couldn't see her face.

She talked to him from outside his line of sight until the anesthesia took hold, watching the muscle tone leave his small body, which she found disturbing in a way she hadn't expected, like watching a rehearsal of death. She left the room as soon as she could.

By some accident of timing, her son woke from anesthesia before anyone called her back. She could hear him screaming 'Mama! Where's my mama?' all the way down the hallway. When she reached him, he was thrashing, trying to rip the IV from his arm. 'He won't remember any of this,' the anesthesiologist assured her, trying to be comforting. She held her son, calmed him, and said the only true thing she had: 'I will.'

This is the double bind at the center of medical trust. Her own father, also a doctor, told her plainly, 'If you're going to get medical care, you're going to have to trust someone.' But trust doesn't arrive on command just because it's needed. The philosopher Mark Sagoff put the problem sharply: where there is trust, paternalism, someone else deciding what's best for you, is unnecessary. Where there is no trust, it is unconscionable. Biss found herself caught exactly there, needing to hand her son's body to a professional she did not, in that moment, fully trust, with no way around the handoff and no way to manufacture the trust that would have made it easier.

There is no clean escape from this bind, whether the choice concerns a child's surgery or a vaccine. Total independence isn't available, since bodies depend on other people's decisions constantly. The honest response isn't finding a system that removes the need for trust, but building it, deliberately and specifically, with the people your body's care actually depends on.

Pick one caregiver or professional you currently rely on for something health-related, and notice honestly how much trust you actually have in them, rather than assuming it's either fully present or entirely absent. When a disagreement comes up with a doctor or caregiver, name your specific concern out loud instead of leaving it as a vague unease, the way asking to stay present during a procedure is different from simply not trusting doctors in general. Look for small, concrete ways to build trust over time with the people your care depends on, through questions answered honestly, small promises kept, rather than expecting it to appear all at once. And when you can't avoid handing over control, notice what that costs you, and say so.