What Strength Is For

Before the labors, Hercules was only strong. That is the part of the story people forget. The strength was a gift — divine, unearned — and on its own it made him nothing but dangerous. What made him a hero was everything that came after: a long series of labors, most of them thankless, some of them filthy, all of them in service of something other than himself. The Greeks were careful about this. They would not let strength be the virtue. They made it the raw material, and the labor the thing that turned it into a life.

I have thought about that order — strength first, meaning second — for most of my life, mostly because I grew up watching my father live it.

I. The Stables

One of the labors set for Hercules was to clean the stables of Augeas in a single day: thirty years of filth, a task built to humiliate as much as to exhaust. It is the labor I think about most, because it is the one where the hero is asked to do the lowest work there is, and does it anyway.

I was born in Dubai, spent my early childhood in Egypt, and immigrated to Canada when I was six. My father had trained as a pediatric surgeon in Egypt, but beginning again in Canada meant temporarily leaving behind the profession and the identity he had spent his whole life building. He answered phones in a call centre. He waited tables. He worked as a chef. He manufactured contact lenses. He did all of it for years before he was able to practise medicine again, as a family physician in northern Manitoba. He never complained. He simply did what needed to be done — for his family first, and eventually for his patients.

That is the thing he taught me without ever sitting me down to say it: humility, resilience, and the plain fact above. We moved often in those years — through Montreal, Ontario, Thompson, and finally Winnipeg — and every uprooting, strangely, pulled the family closer together. I did not understand until much later that I was watching a man carry the whole weight of a second beginning and refuse to let any of us feel it.

II. The Body

In the myths, Hercules simply isthe body — the archetype of what a human frame can do. As a child I was transfixed by that same thing out in the real world. Athletes, dancers, swimmers, and the larger-than-life heroes of the anime I loved. I was absorbed by all the different ways the body let a person move, create, compete, connect, and take in the world.

That fascination became personal through two loves: art and fitness. I have always drawn, because drawing is really observation — noticing proportion, form, movement, the small details that give a thing its character. The gym gave me a different kind of creativity: the discipline of building strength slowly, refining a movement, finding out what the body can become through consistent effort. Art taught me to see carefully. Fitness taught me patience, and respect for the relationship between what a body can do and who a person feels themselves to be. Both, much later, shaped how I understood surgery — as a meeting place of anatomy, craftsmanship, precision, and human purpose.

III. The Guardian

Before Hercules was ever a fighter, he was a protector. When my sister arrived eight years after me, caring for her became my first real responsibility. In our family, being the older brother meant that she was, in many ways, mine to look after. It never once felt like a burden. Whether she was laughing, crying, sick, or simply needed someone beside her, I genuinely loved caring for her. Half of what I now know how to do — cook, organize, lead, stay patient, anticipate what another person needs before they ask — I first learned because of her. She taught me more than I ever taught her, including the most durable truth I know about myself.

IV. The Clinics

I also grew up inside the clinic my father built. The space had once been a glass art store, but he could see what it might become, and we transformed it together. Watching him practise medicine never looked like watching a man finish a job. He ran his clinic the way a conductor stands in front of a symphony — moving between patients, staff, decisions, and interruptions, and somehow keeping all of it in harmony. His patients trusted him not only for what he knew, but for how he made them feel.

My uncle created something similar with his polyclinic in Berlin. Between those two rooms I began to recognize the physician I wanted to be: someone who could care for the individual patient in front of him and also build the environment in which excellent care, collaboration, and human connection could flourish. Hercules is remembered for what he fought, but in some tellings he also founded things meant to outlast him. I noticed early that I was drawn to that second kind of strength.

V. The Forge

I was not especially interested in school when I was young, mostly because I found it slow and repetitive. That changed in high school, when I discovered what happens when curiosity is paired with genuine effort. I became deeply engaged, pushed my averages toward 100 percent, and collected nearly every academic award available to me.

For university I deliberately chose the small, French-language Université de Saint-Boniface. My reasoning was simple: I could read almost any textbook on my own, but close relationships with exceptional teachers are far harder to come by. Some of my classes held only a handful of students, which meant I could speak directly with professors, ask endless questions, and learn how they thought rather than merely memorize what they knew. I finished an accelerated three-year degree and graduated with the Gold Medal.

I entered medicine because I liked almost everything. It was the only profession I could imagine where science, craftsmanship, creativity, and human connection could genuinely share a single job. It let me understand the body while working with my hands. It demanded intellectual discipline and emotional intelligence at once. It gave me room to solve problems, to make things, to communicate, and to care for people in the moments they were most vulnerable.

VI. The Labors

The labors of Hercules were twelve, and no two were alike; the variety was the whole point. A first-year mentorship program introduced me to a few urology residents. Then COVID-19 arrived. During the lockdown I worked on a vaccination team, and in my spare hours I shadowed our short-staffed urology service. I had never once pictured myself becoming a urologist, and yet the specialty kept drawing me back — its people, its humour, its extraordinary breadth, its culture of practical innovation. Urologists could treat cancer, relieve obstruction, reconstruct anatomy, restore continence, preserve fertility, and improve quality of life, often through elegant procedures that produced immediate, tangible change. Twelve labors, all different, all somehow under one roof.

VII. When the Strength Was Taken

Even Hercules was not spared his own body. I have lived through periods of illness in which I could not do the things that normally defined me. I felt my sense of myself begin to slip when I could no longer train, or create, or move the way I wished, or care for others in the way I was used to. That experience taught me something strength could never have: illness does not touch the body in isolation. It moves through confidence, independence, relationships, purpose, and a person’s whole sense of who they are. I know, because I felt it move through mine.

VIII. Lifting the Weight

There is a moment in the myth when Hercules takes the entire weight of the sky onto his own shoulders, just long enough to free the one who had been carrying it. I think about that image constantly now, because it is the closest thing I have to a description of the work I want to spend my life doing.

When a men’s health centre began to grow inside my residency program — the third clinic I have been lucky enough to watch take shape — it showed me what urology could become. Men arrived carrying the weight of sexual dysfunction, infertility, catheter dependence, incontinence, chronic pain, or the aftermath of cancer. Many had lived quietly with these problems for years. After thoughtful counselling and often short, elegant operations, they left lighter.

Until then, I had mostly understood surgery as a way to save a life, to prolong it, or to protect it from disease. Men’s health showed me another purpose entirely: helping make the life a person already has fuller. A man who regains continence can travel, exercise, and sit with friends without fear. A couple who overcomes infertility can build the family they had imagined. A patient who recovers sexual function after cancer can reconnect, physically and emotionally, with the person he loves. Someone freed from a catheter can regain independence and dignity.

That is also why empathy has become central to how I practise. I know that taking the time to truly understand a patient can look inefficient in an increasingly crowded system. But I believe meaningful care begins with understanding what a person is living through, what they have lost, and what they are hoping to regain. A technically successful operation is not a successful outcome unless it addresses what actually matters to the person receiving it.

IX. Undaunted

Years ago, during that first COVID summer, my sister and three of my closest friends were asked to describe me in three words during a game. They landed on passionate, empathetic, and undaunted. I asked one of them — now a neurosurgery resident — what he had meant by the last one. He said something to the effect of: “You see what something could become, and you simply begin. It doesn’t matter that you don’t know how yet, or how tired you are. You’re just unfazed.”

That is how I hope to build my career. An academic men’s health and sexual medicine practice grounded in excellent clinical care, meaningful research, teaching, and innovation. A team that works hard and also laughs together. And, in time, a multidisciplinary centre where patients can find support for every dimension of their recovery — surgery standing alongside pelvic-floor physiotherapy, psychology and psychiatry, fertility care, nutrition, relationship and sexual counselling, and structured exercise and rehabilitation. My love of fitness has taught me that physical recovery can restore confidence and agency; my love of art has taught me that a person can never be understood as merely a collection of parts. I want to build a place where people leave not only treated, but stronger, healthier, and better able to live the lives they actually want.

At the very end of his labors, the reward Hercules is given is not rest. It is to become something larger than the man who began. I do not imagine anything so grand for myself. But I think I finally understand what all of it — the strength, the body, the labors, the lifting — was ever for.

My father uprooted and rebuilt his entire life so that our family could live fully. I intend to spend mine helping others do the same.