Doing Harm Read Online Free

bleary-eyed and blank-faced, stumble into the cafeteria on their way to the 7:00 A.M. change of shift. They grab coffees and juggle paper plates heaping with scrambled eggs and bacon and hash browns to take with them to their jobs upstairs on the patient wards. A few doctors also mill around, mostly other surgery residents wearing long white coats over hospital-issued scrubs—members of surgical teams who have finished their morning rounds and are tanking up before heading to the operating rooms for the rest of the day.
    A boisterous group of surgery residents sits at a nearby table, huddled over their meals, swapping stories about patients. At one point, the table erupts into raucous laughter, and one of them accidentally spills coffee onto his white coat. Cursing, he grabs a napkin and starts wiping at the ugly brown spot spreading toward the embroidered University Hospital emblem stitched in bold maroon across the right breast: a caduceus with the words PRIMUM NON NOCERE printed underneath.
    I idly finger the University Hospital logo on my own white coat.
    University Hospital.
    I love being a doctor; I especially love being a doctor here.
    Who wouldn’t? A sprawling, eclectic complex of sleek, modern high-rises interconnected with squat and sturdy nineteenth-century edifices located in the heart of Boston, University Hospital is the primary teaching hospital for uberprestigious University Medical School, and year after year is consistently ranked among the best hospitals in the world.
    But the place means more to me than just a number on some magazine’s “Best Of” list. Much more. Not a day goes by when I don’t think about how special it is to be part of this place, or remember all of the years of soul-crushing academic labor it took for me to get here. Founded almost 250 years ago by the top doctors in colonial America, who themselves had been trained by the top doctors in Europe, University Hospital is steward of a grand tradition that stretches back generations: a mecca for cutting-edge medical innovation that’s reliably churned out, in equal measure, Nobel Prize winners, medical-school deans, and surgeons general. Only the best of the best are chosen to train here.
    And I’m one of them.
    It certainly wasn’t easy to get here.
    I smile to myself and remember the very first speaker on my very first day of medical school: the dean. He was a burly cardiothoracic surgeon, a former Army Ranger stuffed into a three-piece suit, built like a tank and very imposing, especially to impressionable first-year med students. After making a few perfunctory welcoming comments, he walked out from behind the lectern, took off his suit jacket, carefully laid it over the back of a chair, and walked to the front of the podium. It was a slick move—folksy yet calculating, sparking an immediate sense of intimacy in a roomful of complete strangers. He then launched into an easygoing pep talk, full of earnest admonitions that your dad might have delivered over a mug of hot chocolate sitting at the kitchen table the night before you headed off to college.
    He told us to relax; that we had made it; that our moms were already proud of us; that the competition was over; that it was time to stop trying to beat the grade curve and focus on becoming good doctors.
    Right.
    This to 120 hypercompetitive, anal-retentive, type A overachievers who had spent the last several years single-mindedly decimating any and all obstacles to gain the coveted seats they were now sitting in.
    Who was he kidding? Half of the class was already taking notes. And who could blame us? We’d been competing against one another academically since practically before we could crawl. We were the ones who had survived the premed Darwinian free-for-all in college. We were the ones who had beaten the academic bell curve, who had successfully slipped into that thin sliver of grade Nirvana to the far right of the hump. That’s a tough mentality to shake off. And one,