Doctor, How Many Stitches?

Learning to see life not at the surface, but in its depth

“Doctor, how many stitches?” This question is not just simple curiosity. It is a small but powerful reflection of how we look at life. In the early hours of the morning, at two or three a.m., you enter an operation. You spend hours trying to bring back to life a patient who has been shot, stabbed, or injured in a traffic accident—covered in blood.

Toward dawn, you finish the operation and go to the patient’s side to plan their treatment. If they can open their eyes even a little, if their consciousness begins to return, the first thing they ask is almost always the same: “Doctor, how many stitches?” Because we tend to look at life through numbers.

How many stitches? How many houses? How many cars? How much money? We focus on numbers while overlooking the great effort, the pain, the sacrifice behind them. Yet everything we see on the surface—every number—hides a much larger story, a cost, a long struggle beneath it.

The day we learn to look at life not from the surface but from the depth; the day we begin to see values instead of numbers—only then do we truly become the owners of a meaningful and useful life.