One of those patients traveled across the country to reunite with the man she credits with saving her life.

"It's the purest kind of feeling that you can have for somebody," said Jadwiga Lendo. "The gratitude. That's what it is."

Jadwiga flew from Brooklyn to Seattle this week to visit Dr. Laligam Sekhar, a doctor at Harborview Medical Center.

Two years ago, Dr. Sekhar performed an extremely complicated surgical procedure to remove a dangerous growth from Jadwiga's brain stem. The growth is a "cavernona". Dr. Sekhar describes it as an abnormal tangle of blood vessels that can bleed and usually continues to grow.

"Ninety-nine percent of surgeons are afraid to touch the brain stem," said Dr. Sekhar. "There's a serious risk of paralysis."

At the time, the doctor was working at North Shore University Hospital on Long Island. He remembers meeting Jadwiga, who, after consulting with several other physicians, thought nobody could help her.

"In that instant, we connected," remembers Dr. Sekhar.

Jadwiga was suffering from partial paralysis and other symptoms and was prepared for the worst when she sought a consultation with Dr. Sekhar.

"I already believed it cannot be done," said Jadwiga. "Just for peace of mind I just wanted another doctor to say 'I can't do it,' so I could make peace with my mind that I'm going to die."

But in the summer of 2003, after Dr. Sekhar looked at her MRI, the future looked different.

"He saw the MRI and said 'I can do it,' " she recalls. "And I said, 'What do you mean you can do it?' He said, 'I can do it.' "

During the eight-hour operation, Dr. Sekhar made an incision through the patient's forehead above one eye and carefully cut out and removed the abnormal growth. Computer mapping helped him navigate, but he said finding the growth in the brain is like searching for a bomb that's hidden under the leaves of a forest in autumn.

The operation was a success, and Jadwiga is doing remarkably well. She still has more recovering, but she believes the doctor saved her life.

"I would follow him to the ends of the Earth," said Jadwiga. "It's like seeing a friend."

Dr. Sekhar, who came to Harborview's Neurosurgery department in February, said he saw a spirit and a resolve in this patient that moved him.

"It's a bond nobody can describe. It's a bond between me and her," Dr. Sekhar said. "We connected in a way that I helped her, and you know, in a sense she gave me encouragement and enthusiasm for the next patient."

Dr. Sekhar, a spiritual man who believes in the power of prayer, refuses to believe he saved anybody's life.

"I believe God saved her life. I was an instrument."