A famous surgeon tells about the importance of self-confidence from his own experience.
The Making of a Surgeon
How does a doctor recognize the point in time when he is finally a "surgeon"? As my year as chief resident drew to a close I asked myself this question on more than one occasion. 来源:www.examda.com The answer, I concluded, was self-confidence. When you can say to yourself, "There is no surgical patient I cannot treat competently, treat just as well as or better than any other surgeon" - then, and not until then, you are indeed a surgeon. I was nearing that point.
Take, for example, the emergency situations that we encountered almost every night. The first few months of the year I had dreaded the ringing of the telephone. I knew it meant another critical decision to be made. Often, after I had told Walt or Larry what to do in a particular situation, I d have trouble getting back to sleep. I d review all the facts of the case and, not infrequently, wonder if I hadn t made a poor decision. More than once at two or three in the morning, after lying awake for an hour, I d get out of bed, dress and drive to the hospital to see the patient myself. It was the only way I could find the peace of mind I needed to relax. 来源:www.examda.com Now, in the last month of my residency, sleeping was no longer a problem. There were still situations in which I couldn t be certain my decision had been the right one, but I had learned to accept this as a constant problem for a surgeon, one that could never be completely resolved - and I could live with it. So, once I had made a considered decision, I no longer dwelt on it. Reviewing it wasn t going to help and I knew that with my knowledge and experience, any decision I d made was bound to be a sound one. It was a nice feeling. 来源:www.examda.com In the operating room I was equally confident. I knew I had the knowledge, the skill, the experience to handle any surgical situation I d ever encounter in practice. There were no more butterflies in my stomach when I opened up an abdomen or a chest. I knew that even if the case was one in which it was impossible to anticipate the problem in advance, I could handle whatever l found. I d sweated through my share of stab wounds of the belly, of punctured lungs, of compound fractures. I had sweated over them for five years. I didn t need to sweat any more.
Nor was I afraid of making mistakes. I knew that when I was out in practice I would inevitably err at one time or another and operate on someone who didn t need surgery or sit on someone who did. Five years earlier - even one year earlier - I wouldn t have been able to live with myself if I had had to take sole responsibility for a mistake in judgment. Now I could. I still dreaded errors - would do my best to avoid them -- but I knew they were part of a surgeon s life. I could accept this fact with calmness because I knew that if I wasn t able to avoid a mistake, chances were that no other surgeon could have, either.
This all sounds conceited and I guess it is - but a surgeon needs conceit. He needs it to encourage him in trying moments when he s bothered by the doubts and uncertainties that are part of the practice of medicine. He has to feel that he s as good as and probably better than any other surgeon in the world. Call it conceit - call it self-confidence. whatever it was, I had it.