Doctors' Anxieties

Medicine is stressful, everyone knows that.  Everyone knows there are lives on the line.  But what else is there to be stressed about?

Specifically:

You might be a great medical student, resident, or attending, and then you slip up.  You overlook something or screw up a procedure and it seriously hurts someone.  Everyone starts to talk about it and the person is haunted by it.  Even if you haven't messed up that badly (thankfully I haven't), you're still anxious about it possibly happening every time you do a procedure, or a patient decompensates.

Off the top of my head I've seen surgeons cause pneumothoraces, have a trocar hit an iliac artery, an SVC injury during thoracic surgery, and people hit a carotid artery on central line placement.  I also saw someone's hair fall into someone's chest cavity during surgery.  I've then seen NG tubes placed into a bronchus, or Dobhoff tubes go into the liver.  I've also seen albumin been given for head injury/stroke patients and I'm just not going to get into that; it's bad medicine.

There are a lot of gray areas in medicine: situations in which there is no absolutely correct, clear thing to do, ethically and also medically.  It's also hard living with the thought in the back of your mind that anyone anticoagulated systemically can have a disabling stroke at any time.

They say everything gets better the more experienced you are.  I certainly hope so.  Tomorrow will be a difficult day but I have to rise to the occasion with my limited experience.