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"...yet all the passengers filed out saying, “Thank you! We didn’t know a doctor would still help in an emergency.” But I was like the heroes on the evening news declaring, “No big deal. Just doing my job,” and meaning it..."
The fundamental act of medical care is assumption of responsibility. -Francis D. Moore, MD
The Captain’s call came at 30,000 feet,
a flight attendant’s hand pressing
an oxygen mask to a woman’s mouth, her eyes
rolled back, chin on chest, every crisis
I’ve seen flashing through my mind—
hemorrhagic shock, cardiac arrest,
as if thirty years had not flown by
and I was back in training, not yet a
psychiatrist who read “Management
of In-Flight Medical Emergencies”
a few weeks earlier and thought: No way
will I ever volunteer to deal with that!
But there I was, on automatic pilot,
asking for a blood pressure cuff, IV
lines, a defibrillator, connected
by air-phone to an ER doc in Pittsburgh,
my finger on an irregular carotid
pulse working to reach forty beats.
The details of treatment were simple–
believe me, you could have done it yourself,
yet all the passengers filed out saying, “Thank you!
We didn’t know a doctor would still help
in an emergency.” But I was like the heroes
on the evening news declaring, “No big deal.
Just doing my job,” and meaning it,
even if we can’t let ourselves believe
their modesty. By mid-life and mid-career,
there have been countless times I’ve worked hard
without thanks from anyone, practiced
with dishonor, knowing I didn’t know
enough, because to be a doctor means
a life of shame— for every complication,
missed diagnosis, treatment failure, or death,
that airsick, empty, sour, sinking sense,
we feel when responsibility gnaws
and we struggle against our helplessness
clothed only in white coats that have no wings.
Dr Berlin has been writing a poem about his experience of being a doctor every month for the past 26 years in Psychiatric Times in a column called “Poetry of the Times.” He is instructor in psychiatry, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, Massachusetts. His latest book is Tender Fences.