Perfect Day

GI has been quite a paradox in how I typically envision rotations.  When I started on the NICU, I had heard that it had long hours and was extremely challenging, when I got ready to transfer to GI I heard quite the opposite.  I was told that it had easy hours and the work you did wasn't very difficult at all...and to some extent that has all been very true. However, for whatever reason I have had a really difficult time adjusting to this rotation and in this particular month I have made an abnormal amount of mistakes.  So today as I planned in the back of my head what I was going to blog about, I had decided to commemorate this post to my first "Perfect" day on GI.  Every now and then you have one of these days where you don't make a single clinical mistake (at least in relation to what your superiors deem "correct").  Part of me really was happy for this day, I needed a "win", it's been a really long month, but as I sat dwelling on what a "Perfect" day meant for me I gained a different slightly less optimistic outlook on it, or rather a less pessimistic view of the rest of the month.  If you go through one of these days where everything goes perfectly, what it really means is everything was too simple for you, you weren't challenged, and you didn't learn anything...while that sounds like a downer the flip side of it is that I have been learning a hell of a lot of stuff over this last month - from taking a good GI history to doing a consistently thorough rectal exam (not sure I ever wanted to do that well) - it's been rough and for that I'll be a better doctor. 

In writing this little blurb I got to thinking how chaos (mistakes) can lead to order (perfection) and I was going to get into science versus religion and my struggle in reconciling the two (apparently) warring sides.  However, while that is a really interesting subject, it is going to take me much more time than I have tonight to get it to paper/post.  Instead let me leave you with a promise to revisit that subject and a video (some of you may have seen this).  It's a video recreation of all that goes on inside a single cell at a molecular level.  It's the very picture of complexity and perfection.  Everything you see in this video is coded into DNA, transcribed codon for codon, into these tiny molecular miracles that work 99.99999% of the time.  To me this video really demonstrates perfection and complexity in a way you rarely see.  Regardless of your beliefs on what or who makes miracles like these happen, I think anyone would be hard pressed to refute the miraculous nature of things like these occurring in nature, all the time, every single day, without fail.  It's truly impressive...and this video if anything is likely a vast oversimplification of these processes.