3.4 What I Am

At some point during surgical residency, most interns get a sense of who they are as doctors and the kinds of surgeons they want to become.

If you ask them, they'll tell you they want to be general surgeons, orthopaedic surgeons, neurosurgeons.

Distinctions which do more than describe their area of expertise, they define who they are, because outside the operating room, not only do most surgeons have no idea who they are, they're also afraid to find out.

3.3 Sometimes a Fantasy

Surgeons usually fantasize about wild and improbable surgeries.

Someone collapses in a restaurant, you splice them open with a butter knife, replace a valve with a hollowed out stick of carrot— but every now and then some other kind of fantasy slips in.

Most of our fantasies resolve when we wake, vanished to the back of our mind, but sometimes we're sure if we try hard enough— we can live the dream.

The fantasy is simple.

Pleasure is good, and twice as much pleasure is better.

That pain is bad, and no pain is better.

But the reality is different.

The reality is that pain is there to tell us something, and there's only so much pleasure we can take without getting a stomach ache.

And maybe that's okay. Maybe some fantasies are only supposed to live in our dreams.