Erica Sutton

Enough to be dangerous

Sam fell back against the wall outside of the OR. The case took hours longer than she expected. For the better part of two hours, she could only partially see what was happening. She was barely able to carry out her duties of sucking smoke and blood from the operative field. Still, her day was not done. When her chief resident called her to the OR to help out, she was wrapping up random floor “scut.” “Scut” encompassed the endless patient care tasks assigned to the first-year doctors, the interns, who know just enough medicine to be dangerous. Scut was the entry level of learning, not quite mindless, seemingly infinite. The trauma service was a 24-hour nonstop specialty, but tonight, she was not on call and she had plans. She was scheduled to be at the free clinic at 6:30pm. Her work there, not unsimilar to her work at the hospital, somehow recharged her. Taking care of the people there, uninsured and underserved, helped her reconnect to why she became a doctor in the first place.