A long time ago I traded in the expression "ignorance is bliss" for "Chance favors the prepared mind." It works better for me.
I can see how you might view surgery and surgical training as a source of dread; let me try to provide you with some reassurance.
Uncertainty is an undeniable part of surgical practice. All surgeons would like to care for patients who have no co-morbidities: no asthma, no heart disease, no sleep apnea, no kidney dysfunction, no cirrhosis. We want patients who are young, take no medications, and who run 10K's for fun, because we know they have the constitution to get through whatever physiologic challenges might come up in the course of a hospital stay. Alas, healthy people do not need surgery. Only sick ones do. And I take care of them.
When I do a colon resection on a patient who is elderly, obese, hypertensive, who's on twenty medications, and inhalers, and has a walker, and when I'm looking at that anastomosis (the spot where the colon has been seen back together again), and it's tenuous, and yet I've done everything humanly possible to give that anastomosis and that patient the best possible chance to heal, my best effort doesn't placate me. I fret. For the three or four days after that surgery that I wait for that anastomosis to heal, I don't sleep. I lie awake at night, waiting for the phone call that he's got a fever, or tachycardia, or worsening pain. If the patient is nauseated, I wonder - is this it? Are we going to have to go back to the OR? I worry. I agonize.
And when the patient gets better, the gut works, he chows down on his gross hospital food and tells me he's ready to get out of here, I rejoice. The patient's colon cancer is gone and he can pack his duffel bag of meds and his walker and go back to the life he was living.
How do I take your anxiety away, Emily? All I can tell you is that surgeons are human too, and despite all the bad press about doctors who cut corners and make mistakes and the financial healthcare crisis and superbugs overrunning hospitals, and all the rest of it, doctors DO care. Though no one publicizes it anymore, doctors still go into medicine to heal the sick, to try to help people when they're ill. We spend years of our lives learning how to do that best, how to cure when the patient can be cured, and how to console when they can't.
It should not frighten you that surgeons are human, Emily, it should comfort you. Find a doctor you can talk to, a doctor you feel good about, someone you feel that really cares about you and whom you feel you can trust. That is what doctors need: patients who trust them to do the right thing. That is our stake in the game- the patient wants to be cured, and the surgeon wants to make it happen.
