I popped into the delivery suite just to check the fetal heartbeat strip during a birth. The babys tracing was spoton, absolutely normal. I watched that wavy line crawl across the monitor and my mind drifted to the midwife whod just had a baby with a serious condition Id sent that little one home, hoping for the best. Now I needed to sort out cover with another midwife from the gynaecology team to make sure the reception ward stayed staffed.
Is everything alright? Please tell me, the expectant mother, looking worried, met my eyes. Whats on the monitor something wrong? You look so focused.
The toughest part of being a doctor is learning how to keep a good face on. All our training is about piecing together bits of information tiny clues that eventually form the whole picture. We learn to watch, to wait patiently, to intervene only when needed, and to make the right call in a heartbeat. We never got lessons in acting.
Imagine this: after a tough operation, in the dead of night, youve just washed the blood off your hands with icy water, you havent even had a chance to catch your breath, and youre sprinting back to the reception area. You have to greet the next patient with a warm smile, genuinely friendly, and make a terrified, confused person just pulled in by the ambulance feel safe, loved, and that help is on the way.
We were never taught that a sick person is scared. No matter how professional we become, no matter how we cope with the hardest situations, we have to keep that calm face. Fear twists reality yours and theirs. Outside the hospital doors, your parents are ill, kids have lost their keys and are waiting on the stairs, the ICU cant stabilise a pregnant woman with a nonviable baby, and the theatre nurse is having a hypertensive crisis. All that chaos swirls in your head, but somewhere above your own mask
Keeping your face steady is hard, especially when you realise youre fifteen minutes from a disaster. You have to push through your own fear, give clear orders, explain calmly to the patient why were rushing, reassure her and her family, get consent for the operation and then dash to the trolley, shedding your coat on the way all while keeping that face.
And when the drama is over and youve walked off the stage, you dont head back to the hall; you slip behind the curtains. The hardest part comes when the catastrophe has already happened. You still have to keep that face, ignore the cold in your chest, and keep talking to patients, to relatives, to strangers, to yourself, to God, to your own tangled thoughts, to the senior consultants, and again to the families.
You keep talking until the tight knot of pain in your chest loosens enough to let you take a proper breath, knowing that the night shift has carved a new line on your heart. An hour later, youre heading to see a new patient, still holding that face, rubbing gently under your left collarbone as you go.
Because doctors mess up. Every single one of us. Even the ones who seem handed down from God. Were human, and only those who dont work make no mistakes at all. Even the most precise machines fail they were built by people, and people err. The scariest thing is realising when youve made a mistake, replaying the moment over and over, wondering what would have happened if youd done something differently. The answer never comes, and youre left staring at a perfectly normal ECG with tired, clouded eyes that have grown accustomed to the fatigue over years.
You might have missed a completely normal lab result that no one else would have noticed, followed a dosage protocol to the letter, arrived a minute late or too early, looked at an Xray and saw nothing or saw the wrong thing. Your vision is the same as it was yesterday, a month ago. Maybe your hand slipped with the scalpel, and a clamp snapped off a vessel. Why didnt it snap yesterday, the day before, a year ago? Six night shifts in two weeks is a lot, especially when your mum is at home recovering from a stroke.
In medicine time is relative, and your loved ones have long been in that honourable final place. The worst part can be not even knowing what you did wrong, because then it can happen again. How many more textbooks, training sessions, sleepless nights does it take to make sure it doesnt? No one knows. And what about the cold, hard statistics that whisper, in a soulless voice, that out of every thousand births, surgeries or procedures, there will be three, five, ten complications worldwide every day, every month, every year. Someones life, someones health, someones tragedy.
So what does a doctor do when his name lands on that list? He stands before grieving families and says, Thats me. Im the one who caused this. Can you even picture yourself in that spot, with countless heartbroken people staring back at you, and you being the sole source of their unbearable sorrow? Thats the reality we face.
Why, when a doctor makes a single mistake, do we erase the countless times he got it right? Doctors err because theyre human. Gods dont err. Their world, their creation, their statistics are flawless. The more I work, the more I understand that only the chosen can truly grasp that design. Were not chosen were ordinary people, ordinary doctors, doing our best to keep a stiff upper lip when the world tries to pull it away.
