The unsettling incongruity of a medical student’s “lucky” day
“She has a pneumothorax. You ever placed one of these before?”
The senior resident handed me a chest tube. An intern who had been standing nearby smiled and quipped, “It’s your lucky day.”
Three weeks into my surgery rotation — my first rotation of third year — I was taking a night shift in the emergency room when paramedics wheeled Ms. P into the trauma bay, frail and bruised, hardly breathing. Oftentimes, …
