Nutcase (1)

The hospital in the afternoon was bustling as always,

and I, who had been thrown into a storm of a schedule from the very first day of my rotation, had had a rather extraordinary day.

I came in at 6 a.m., and within ten minutes I had stuck a needle into a patient in another department’s ICU,

been summoned by a tiger-like chief of thoracic surgery and dragged through a morning hearing on cardiac pathophysiology,

and before lunch was even over, I was called into the emergency operating room to observe a surgery.

It felt like I had lived a full week in a single day.

By afternoon, I was back in the thoracic surgery ICU on the fifth floor of the main building.

The patient who had been teetering on the brink this morning, with blood pressure plunging below 50, was now sleeping peacefully with a thick chest tube inserted.

The numbers on the monitor had, like magic, returned to a stable state.

“Oh, looks good.”...