• History

Teach your children well

Their Father's hell did slowly go by

And feed them on your dreams

The one they picked

The one you know by

Don't you ever ask them why

If they told you, you would cry

So just look at them and sigh

And know they love you

—Graham Nash, Déjà vu, 1970

One day about a week into my tenure as a staff neurointerventionalist I called my mentor, Joe Horton, during a moment of shear emotional exhaustion. I told him I had just participated in the most difficult diagnostic angiogram I had ever experienced. Joe was surprised and somewhat chagrined by my admission. He thought he had trained me during my fellowship to deal with any obstacle that human anatomy and physiology could throw at me. So he asked me to be more specific about the technical aspects of the procedure which had given me so much trouble. I then told him the source of my anxiety was not from any technical barriers which I had personally faced but from the dyspeptic feeling of observing my fellow while he was performing his first cerebral angiogram.

There are few tasks as difficult but ultimately as rewarding as …