Feeling Good - The Story of Sam & Henry

Chapter 32 - Lose Control

(Monday 6:52 am)
Hey, I'm sorry it's so early, I'm about to go into surgery and I wanted to text you to apologize for last night
I fell asleep and missed your text
I figured you had tonight off because it's Monday, can I stop by after work?
I want to see you

~~
Getting back into the OR after what happened on Saturday made me feel like a fraud and an imposter. This wasn't the first time that I had lost a patient, and I knew it wouldn't be the last, but the weight of my own failure and incompetence made me feel like I was drowning. As a general rule, surgeons tend to be a stoic bunch. We don't often talk about our feelings or emote publicly; or if we do, often our inner turmoil manifests as anger or frustration. I'd seen it before in my fellow residents and in my attendings. Clinically, I knew that it wasn't healthy to bury the feelings that I was having about the patient I had lost, but I didn't really know what else to do. Talking about it seemed futile – was that going to bring her back?

Doctors always joke about the different personality types of each specialty: internists enjoy the mental masturbation of rare diseases, radiologists are vampires, pathologists are on the autism spectrum, dermatologists went into medicine to make money and surgeons are asshole cowboys who take risks for a living. Obviously, these stereotypes fall apart all the time because, frankly, anyone can be an asshole, but as is often the case there is a kernel of truth at the core of these stereotypes because the demands of the job self-select for different personality types. Going 'balls to the wall' is sort of in our nature, it's probably what attracted us to surgery to begin with, but it comes at a cost. To have the guts to cut someone open because you are confident that you can help them by making them bleed carries with it the very real possibility that you will be wrong. And they will be dead. If doubt consumed you, you'd never make the first incision, so having regrets in surgery isn't very useful.

The first time I lost a patient I was just starting my second year of residency. In retrospect, the situation hadn't really been my fault, or anyone's fault for that matter, but mistakes were made and the patient had died on the table under my hands. At the time, my reaction to what happened was the catalyst that ended my relationship with Madison. I completely shut down emotionally and refused every attempt on her part to assuage the guilt and remorse I was feeling. By the time she moved out, I was just beginning to get a handle on what an emotional wreck I had become and was starting to pay attention to what I had put her through. Unfortunately for us both, I realized as she was leaving that my efforts at self-awareness and reconciliation had been too little, too late.

Every subsequent relationship I had had after that had been entirely physical out of design and necessity. I had dated a few nurses and a respiratory technician, people who I met at the hospital and who had approached me about getting together. Anytime we started veering into more serious territory I would feel myself back away, either because I knew that I wasn't interested and I didn't want to play games or because I was interested, and I felt that I just couldn't put in the time and effort to do right by them.

What surprised me the most about Sam is how totally unexpected my feelings for her were. It had been so long since I'd seriously dated anyone, I think I was mostly surprised that I had feelings at all. But I did. I liked her, a lot. She was strong and independent and funny. She was confident and opinionated and so fucking hot. Thinking about her now was making my dick hard, which was really not ok, because scrub pants do NOTHING to hide erections, however fleeting.

For the last two days I had felt lost. Anger and doubt swirled around me like a hurricane, but at the calm in the eye of the storm there was another feeling: connection. I felt tethered to Sam in some small way and it almost felt painful, because I worried that the internal emotional maelstrom inside of me would somehow break this connection. But I knew that I couldn't afford to do that. Spending time with her over the last month had reminded me that I was more than just my hands; I had interests and hobbies and I wanted a life outside of my job.