One of the stories that has haunted me since medical school didn’t even happen to me. It happened to my good friend Ben, a tall man with a sweet smile and a gentle manner. We were doing our surgery rotation at a private hospital in Brooklyn and the chief resident, Dr. A, was young, attractive—and mean. He delighted in torturing the medical students.
One day Ben was in surgery with this chief resident and the cardiac surgeon who was the attending. They were repairing an abdominal aortic aneurysm.
The chief resident asked Ben* to cut the threads on the stitch he had just placed in the aorta.
When Ben did, Dr. A screamed, “Oh my God, you cut the aorta! You’ve killed the patient! Oh my God!”
Ben stepped back, horrified.
A few seconds later, Dr. A started laughing. “Just kidding, man.” He went back to stitching the patient’s aorta.
“What did the attending say?” I asked when Ben told me this story. We were in the hallway of the OR suite, waiting for our next cases to begin. He was pale and his hands were trembling.
“Nothing,” Ben said. “He just stood back until Dr. A started laughing and then he went back to what he was doing.”
Those few seconds when Ben thought he’d killed someone colored the rest of his medical school experience. For those few seconds, he had killed someone by making a mistake, by not being perfect. I wonder how he carried that forward into his medical career.
*Names and details changed to protect the innocent—and the guilty.