Must-read! Amazing! A self-critical, self-aware, proud yet humble insights of a doctor regarding medicine. It's humbling for a non-medical person to understand what doctors go through in their life-saving career.

Let’s play the “who wants to be horrified” game. Complications made it hard to sleep. Not because of gore necessarily but because it made clear to me that doctors are just people who were given a scalpel. Yes, they have a ton of education but at some point, they must get experience.

In one section Gawande discusses a procedure in which he must put in a central line which goes into a major vein in your chest which can technically kill you. All he tells the patient is that he must put in a central line, not that it is dangerous or that it is his first time doing this procedure. I completely understand why he didn’t tell the patient, but that doesn’t make it any less terrifying. I have thought about how doctors have to start at some point, but it was never so clear to me that there is a first patient for every procedure for every doctor. For every surgeon, there will be the first surgery. There is a first time for cutting into the flesh of a still-living person.

It was published in 2002 so I’m sure some things have changed, but it’s still current enough about how the training takes place.

It’s an important realization of how much control doctors have over our bodies and how little they have over everything else in the hospital. They don’t get to choose...
For the full review please visit https://www.literarydragonreviews.web...

Fluid narrator with his intonation and reading. Gawande is a skilled storyteller and surgeon " Outer facia layer was grey, dead and streptococcus A toxic" (in his mention of 23 year old girl in the Operating Room).

When a surgeon murmurs a expletive rich epithet after confirming a patient came in with necrotizing fasciitis---which is a complex reference to a particularly nefarious flesh-eating bacteria---confirming it's potentially lethal.

Truly riveting and a must read for the curious, medical student or investigate medical journalist. Learned "to describe one case is to describe them all" as surgeons are machines and perform consistently despite any external pressure. Many lessons within, inspires and educates, buy it!