The hours are inhumane.
Thoracic surgeon: “Never stand when you can sit. Never sit when you can lie down. Never lie down when you can sleep.”
Orthopedic surgery resident: “We do 72 hours on call on the weekends…but if you just accept that you’ll have no life for five years, it’s not so bad.”
Fellow medical student: “You have to decide when you’re too tired to eat, or too hungry to sleep.”
The people are insane.
Fellow medical student: “Yes, Dr. Job’s the surgeon who asked the nurse for a sterile towel. She handed it to him. Dr. Job thanked her, tossed the towel over the resident’s face, and punched him through the drape, so that his fist would stay sterile. Then Dr. Job kept on operating.” Pause. “But the he’s always been very nice to me.”
You literally hold someone’s life in your hands.
And the one thing that nobody told me before I plunged hands-first into my first surgical rotation—the thing I had to discover for myself—was that, compared to anything else in medicine…
Every blood-spattered second of surgery is So. Much. Fun.
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