BMJ  2004;329 (7 August), doi:10.1136/bmj.329.7461.0-g

Editor's choice

All doctors have a personal horror story

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Most doctors have at some time borne the broken look of Marlon Brando's Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, dehumanised by the Vietnam War. For me, "the horror" was over 10 years ago as a preregistration doctor in surgery at St James's Hospital, Leeds, about the time the European Working Time Directive was conceived by people with time to think. I began a weekend shift at 8 am on Saturday morning, an endless ward round of patients I'd never seen before with illnesses I little understood. I finished at 9 pm on Monday after non-stop calls—mostly straightforward but many bewilderingly complex—a couple of cheese sandwiches, a few cans of soft drinks, and three hours of broken sleep on a two seater sofa.

At some point on Sunday evening my fellow junior doctors and I cracked. Overworked, sleepless in surgery, every incident and comment greeted with unstoppable mirth, professionalism replaced by . . . [Full text of this article]

Kamran Abbasi, acting editor

(kabbasi@bmj.com)


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Rapid Responses:

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Hopefully, doctors in future may not have horror stories! At least not of this kind!
Padmini Venkataramani
bmj.com, 5 Aug 2004 [Full text]
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