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Notes -
Gas is a lot like being a pilot and flight attendant in that you receive a lot of training for things that aren't often happening and that the average person doesn't see or notice. Job looks easy when things are going smooth. Every time you do something you do a lot of preparation and planning that seems to happen automagically to outsiders.
Unlike aviation, the plane tries to crash repeatedly and active actual plane crashes happen a few times a week. Fundamentally you are fighting to keep the patient alive while the surgeon tries to kill the patient. Think about things like open heart surgery. Even something as simple as an open gallbladder involves radically changing the patient's physiology. Bad outcomes get blamed on you and are your fault.
Surgery isn't everything gas does though.
Imagine you are working a 24 hour shift overnight, it's 4am and you are sitting in a break room watching jeopardy reruns and eating shitty chips from a bag, your pager goes off. You have 90 seconds to get to the trauma bay, where you find a patient has got hit in the face with a sledgehammer. His anatomy looks a cheeseburger put in a food processor and pulsed. You have to keep the guy alive long enough to put a tube down this throat, get fluids and blood running, and get the guy to the OR where another doc and the surgical team repairs the guy's face in an 16 hour surgery.
Ten minutes later you are back to eating chips and watching jeopardy.
OB, psych, and gas have serious tempo issues which more resemble the military and police and are not for everyone.
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