“Should we call a code? I think we should call a code.” A team of us were in the resuscitation bay with an angry monitor and a suddenly very ill patient. The emergency room nurse looked over her glasses at us as my resident started compressions with a look that plainly said “nice try.” She reminded us that the entire reason the ER has resuscitation bays is because the ER staff do their own resuscitations. By then, of course, momentum and reflexes had kicked in. Despite our slightly reluctant beginning, the team rekindled a heartbeat at the cost of only a few new grey hairs.

 Later that shift—it was a busy afternoon—one of the ER doctors hooked me by the collar with one hand, a suture tray with the other, and introduced me to Scott, who’d given his forehead a handsome cut when he stood up too fast in his cluttered garage. I’d just been drafted into suturing duty. My preceptor was well aware of my lack of confidence in my suturing abilities, hence the ambush. I put on a brave face, Scott winced at the freezing, and (at the cost of only a few more grey hairs) I sent him on his way with fourteen stitches and a tetanus shot.

At the end of the week, we were in simulation, and I was the head of the team. When I announced that our patient/dummy needed to be intubated, I suddenly had 4 sets of eyes on me and an intubation tray at my side. Even though it was just a mannequin, I was anxious. So I gritted my teeth (and fortunately not the patient’s), resigned myself to premature aging, and eventually succeeded.

Now, I prefer the term “cautious” to “cowardly,” but I have to admit that I’m scared by the prospect of actually doing procedures. Thinking, contemplating, and studying I can handle, since they’re the skills that got me into Medicine. However, my fine motor skills are only about enough to chop up most of a head of lettuce without cutting myself. No matter how many times I sew up little cuts on the arm or leg, I still think “oh goodness, this is the time I trip and nick the carotid.” It’s awful.

What’s worse, though, is that I went for nearly a year letting myself feel like a failure for being scared. Somehow I forgot that despite scraped knees and lots and lots of tears, today I ride a bike just fine. It wasn’t until a doctor took me aside and said how painfully I reminded him of his own past anxiety that it clicked. So now I look in the mirror every night, brush my hair, and remind myself that I have yet to kill anyone.

I am a History student and tea-drinker in my final year of clerkship at the University of Saskatchewan. Once free to roam the professional world, I hope to teach and to work in palliative and hospice medicine