Surviving house jobs - excerpt from the bible

If some fool or visionary were to say that our aim should be to produce the greatest health and happiness for the greatest number of our patients, we would not expect to hear the greatest cheering from the midnight house officers: rather, our ears are detecting a decimated groan - because these men and women know that there is something at stake in house-officership far more elemental than health or happiness: namely survival. Here we are talking about our own survival, not that of our patients. It is hard to think of a greater peacetime challenge than these first few months in the wards. Within the first weeks, however brightly your armour shone, it will be smeared and splattered if not with blood, then with the fallout from very many decisions which were taken without sufficient care and attention. Not that you were lazy, but force majeure on the part of Nature and the exigencies of ward life have, we are suddenly stunned to realize, taught us to be second rate: for to insist on being first-rate in all areas is to sign a kind of death warrant for many of our patients, and more pertinently for this page, for ourselves. Perfectionism cannot survive in the clinical world. To cope with this fact, or, to put it less depressingly, to flourish in this new world, don't keep re-polishing your armour, rather, furnish your mind and nourish your body. Do not voluntarily deprive yourself the restorative power of sleep. A good nap is the order of the day - and for the nights, sleep for as long as possible. Remember that sleep is our natural state in which we were first created, and we only wake to feed our dreams.

Copied from the Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine, 7th edition.

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