I called my supervising physician to alert him to the situation. He quickly cut me off and barked, “Are you seriously waking me up to tell me about a dead person?” and hung up. I was stunned at the time, but in retrospect, his response was understandable: this man was getting woken every night by residents, still had a full operating room schedule every day, and was similarly desperate for sleep, even thirty years into the job. By my fifth year, when I was a chief resident, I looked back on my time in residency as if it were a blur. For most days, I stood in a windowless operating room,
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