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Here's a confession:

On my first labour room call duty as a medical student, I fainted after observing the very first childbirth in my life. 

It was a typical Thursday evening, only it wasn't typical at all (in my context). We were following a case which was supposed to be a normal delivery, but after close to 10 hours of labour pain, momma was too exhausted to push! Long story short, it ended up as an assisted delivery where a forcep and vacuum were involved, along with A LOT of shouting/crying, and inevitably, many (MANY) blood-soaked surgical towels.

A baby boy was delivered 10 mins later. I caught a glimpse of the baby at the hallway as the nurses wheeled him in a incubator to the NICU, and it was an image I could never possibly forget - he was tiny and greyish-blue, the use of vacuum caused the shape of his head turned conical. 

The rest of the night happened in blur (read above) and after that night, everyone in the labour room knew about me.

That night I went home with nothing but embarrassment.

That night I decided that maybe, maybe I am not a surgeon-material.

It wasn't the blood that I was afraid of. 

It was the thought of "what if it was me?"

***

There's this thing that happens when people find out you're a doctor. They stop seeing you as a person and begin to see you something bigger than you are. They have to see us that way, as gods, otherwise we're just like everyone else, unsure, flawed, normal. So we act strong, we remain stoic. We hide the fact that we're all too human.

Patients see us as gods or they see us as monsters. But the fact is, we're just people. We screw up, we lose our way. Even the best of us, have our off days. Still we move forward. We don't rest on all the rules or celebrate the lives we've saved in the past. Because there's always some other patient that needs our help. So we force ourselves to keep trying, to keep learning. In the hope that, maybe someday we'll just come a little bit closer to the gods our patients need us to be.