Night Shift: Mavericks

I just celebrated my 70th birthday recently.  It was a wonderful time with my family.  But all the well wishes from my colleagues, all of whom are much smarter than I, reminded me of all the lies told about people at their funerals. It made me wonder if they knew something about my health that I didn’t.  It reminded me of the guy who asked his old family doctor if his condition was terminal.  The old timer just looked at him and said, “I don’t really know how long you have.  But if I were you, I wouldn’t make any investments in all day suckers or long playing records.” So just in case, I thought I might make some reflections on the past and suggestions for the future.  I was still in high school when the first ER docs took the plunge to commit their professional lives to our specialty.  The year I graduated from medical school was the first year the conjoint board exam for the specialty of emergency medicine was offered. I was simply in awe of the pioneers in our field.  They were mavericks.  Many left behind the safety and celebration of being specialists in other fields to launch out in this new area of ‘expertise,’ that frankly no one at the time much respected. My residency advisor in medical school sent a note to professors that I respected asking them to talk me out of wasting my time training for this field.  ER docs were the ‘eternal interns’ to many in medicine.  We had to fight for every ounce of respect that flows to us so freely today....
Source: EPMonthly.com - Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Source Type: news