Fall. Get up. Keep going. There's work to be done.

I find one of the toughest thing as a doctor is to sometimes having to separate your own emotions from your task on hand. This is especially true when you are dealing with some adversity, or in some unfortunate situation, emotionally still dealing with a bad outcome with a patient, yet having to move on, because a new case await you, and you better enter the next battle with a clean slate of mind.

Every so often, you come across a case that humbles you. In fact, these often scare you to pieces. The outcome is often unexpected. Had it been more obvious, you might have caught it. But no, the body doesn't follow the textbook, and sometimes it's just hard to pick up subtle signs. With every bad outcome, there are always learning points. I keep a log, fortunately not too large of a collection, but it serves to remind me the little lessons along the way that hopefully can make me better.

But emotionally, having to deal with a miss is never easy. It consumes you. It doubts your abilities. It shatters your confidence.

Yet, without pause, you have a next patient waiting for you, expecting nothing less than your best effort, and in their mind, near perfection. Of course, one should not expect anything less naturally.

But yet, how does a warrior, in the midst of some degree of self doubt and broken confidence, go on fighting his best fight. Yet that is the task bestowed upon us. I might take a minute or two to regroup. But then I ask myself, am I ready for the fight. If I say no, I have better excuse myself from the battle. But frequently, you demand detachment from yourself. You set aside what just happened. Your reset. You motor on.

That is one of the hardest thing to learn, but yet I think most critical. It's naive to think that our past do not factor into our future decision making. Would we become overly cautious now? And work up everything. Would I question every grey area, but that would cripple me as an effective decision maker. My more senior colleagues would remind me, that we work in a high risk area, and that bad things happen. We try our best to minimize it, but we cannot let them consume us.

Best practices come in many forms. It's up to each one of us to decide what is our standard. But at every junction, I guess the only way forward, is to keep trying my best. To have no regrets, to feel I have done what I can do at the moment for each case, and then wipe my mind clean, and move on.

Patients are waiting. Things have to get done. You do the best you can.