How to Be a Successful Medical Student

When you're a medical student, you have no autonomous responsibility for patients. So every starting out intern is terrified that we're going to hurt somebody. On my first day, I met my resident, a spitball, redheaded guy who was on our service. He got paged to the CCU, the coronary care unit, and started running. It was a cardiac arrest. And they were doing chest compressions and you could hear the ribs cracking. They were ventilating him with a balloon on the breathing machine and giving electric shocks to the heart. When someone said, put in a central line, and they looked at me. I had never put in acentral line before.