I wish someone would have told me I didn’t have a clue what I was saying. That I didn’t have the foggiest idea what the heck I was talking about.
I was an upper-level medical resident. Confident. Running a team of internal medicine physicians who were also in training.
“You need to order a CAT scan on this patient,” I told the resident doctor working underneath me. “At least, for medical-legal reasons,” I said.
The patient was having some vague chest pain. It clearly wasn’t a heart attack. I knew that. It was probably a twinge in the chest muscle. The patient could have probably gone home from the emergency department with reassurance, but the doctor there had already decided the patient should spend the night in the hospital.
“We need to rule out pulmonary embolism,” I told the young physician on my team. “The attorneys would have a field day if we missed that.”
At that particular moment, I had only seen the inside of a court room once before. And, it wasn’t for medical reasons.
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