dear surgery team,

at the end of the most gratifying day of my life it is my profoundest joy writing you these lines.

i thank you; for saving my son, for your knowledge, your experience, your craftsmanship, your vision, your patience, your effort, the post-operative meeting. in essence: for the choice of your profession and how you go after it!

i congratulate you to your success; medical as well as humane, to have facilitated a life's new start, to have kept together a family, to have restored it!

i admire your excellence; to regain hope against medical odds, to - based on out-of-your-field argumentation - question points of view, to meet a layman at eye level, to have a - technically not even born yet - child dictate direction and pace! this truly requires remarkable character qualities!

in analogy to sailors wishing for always a few inches of water under their keels, i wish you for less glorious moments than today above all: always one more idea! i wish you from my heart, when you are the first in line, the one everybody looks to for solutions, at the end of it all, may you have always one more brain spark, one that turns it all to the better! for if this story taught me one thing, it is this: never give up!

yours in deep gratitude and very respectfully, also on behalf of my wife
mick s., father.