


Life In His Hands

Peter Goldsworthy, reviewer
April 11, 2008

The story of the relationship forged between neurosurgeon Charlie Teo and his patient, pianist Aaron McMillan.

Neurosurgeon Charlie Teo and his patient, pianist Aaron McMillan.

Neurosurgeon Charlie Teo and his patient, pianist Aaron McMillan.

Susan Wyndham
Memoir, Biography

While waiting for the report of the scan that first reveals his brain tumour, the young pianist Aaron McMillan overhears a nurse, looking at the images, ask another. "When did this one die?"

Not the best way to hear the bad news, however exaggerated, but there was better news to follow from the neurosurgeon Charlie Teo, or news, at least, that could be digested with a mix of hope, stoicism and denial.

Susan Wyndham's Life In His Hands is the story of the relationship of the flamboyant Teo and his young patient. It's an insider's story; granted intimate access to both men, Herald journalist Wyndham becomes a friend to both. Her story, then, is affectionate, but still honest in its discussion of character failings - it's no hagiographic duet.

At first glance it's difficult to imagine two more divergent personalities: the penniless but generous free-floating music-obsessive who managed just 28 per cent in his year 10 chemistry exams before giving up school, and the coolly objective, highly trained and focused neurosurgeon who drinks no caffeine or alcohol to maintain a steady hand.

Yet we find they have much in common. Both work as hard with their hands as their minds; their chosen careers require tremendous mental and physical stamina. Both are larger than life; both take a crash-through-or-crash approach to problems; in difficult surgical fixes Charlie Teo likes to ask himself, alarmingly, "What would John Wayne do?" Both are also formidable self-promoters; both have plenty of self to promote.

Both also like to argue that their attention-seeking serves a noble cause: raising money and the profile of neurosurgery on one hand, and of music - his own and others - on the other. Charlie Teo emerges as the more complex of the two - being older he has had time to accumulate more layers of complexity - and is therefore, finally, the more interesting. His superficial eccentricities (he has a black belt in karate, plays the bagpipes dressed in a kilt, rides a powerful motorbike and "loves speed") are layered upon a core of restless, complex drives. He flirts with nurses, sometimes too much. He is "boastful in a specialty full of large egos".

Perhaps it's the medico in me that is riveted by the battles of this brash arriviste back from the US with the local neurosurgical establishment. I don't know the statistics, but he gave McMillan years more life than the few weeks offered by others.

"Heroic" such surgeons were called when I worked in hospitals, and it wasn't necessarily a term of praise. As an American colleague of Teo says, "if I needed to cross a minefield ... I'd push him ahead because he'd set off all the mines." But I think I'd let him mess about inside my head if I ever needed it.

The same neurosurgical colleague describes Teo's 12-hour operation to remove McMillan's brain tumour as "the reverse of building a ship inside a bottle; he had to dismantle it inside", and in the end, says that Teo has only one flaw: "That incessant John Denver music. I used to like John Denver before I knew Charlie."

The book is full of such novelistic character details, but Wyndham has also done her research on the technical side, painstakingly. She must have spent days standing flat-footed and masked through interminable fine vessel cauterisings and skull trepannings, or just hanging around surgeons' tearooms listening to the chatter.


If I can't get Charlie Teo to remove my brain tumour or subdural haematoma when the time comes, I might do worse than ask Susan Wyndham to scrub up - assisted perhaps by Ian McEwan.

The story ends, as we know it must, with bad news. "I knew the book I was writing had changed when I came home ... to two messages," Wyndham writes at the beginning of an Epilogue. One message is from the pianist, the other from the surgeon. Both are urgent, and both have the same news: the recurrence of the malignancy. But while one is still bravely optimistic, the surgeon's message this time is darker.

Wyndham, who has invested much in Teo's powers and McMillan's hopes, parts with her own illusory hope: "I realised that Aaron's experience was now a more realistic case study of the neurosurgeon's work."

"Goodnight, sweet prince", his mother often told Aaron at bedtime, but perhaps the next lines Horatio speaks at the end of Hamlet are more apposite after the triumphs and trials of a short life: "And choirs of angels sing thee to thy rest."

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