How true it is that the education never really resembles the practice.
I do remember my uncle who is a doctor saying how much he enjoyed delivering babies though…
It is one of the few times in the hospital that is a (mostly) happy occasion.
We entered the room. I stood awkwardly off to the side until Melissa pushed me to the front, between the patient’s legs, just in front of the attending. “Push!” the nurse encouraged. “Now again: just like that, only without the screaming.” The screaming didn’t stop, and was soon accompanied by a gush of blood and other fluids. The neatness of medical diagrams did nothing to represent Nature, red not only in tooth and claw but in birth as well. (An Anne Geddes photo this was not.) It was becoming clear that learning to be a doctor in practice was going to be a very different education from being a medical student in the classroom. Reading books and answering multiple-choice questions bore little resemblance to taking action, with its concomitant responsibility.
-Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air (Amazon)
