“Anyway, Tarceva is a special drug, and it requires a fellow or attending to sign off on it. Do you really want me to wake someone up for this? Can’t it wait till morning?” And there it was. Meeting his obligation to me meant adding one more thing to his to-do list: an embarrassing phone call with his boss, revealing his error. He was working the night shift. Residency education regulations had forced most programs to adopt shift work. And along with shift work comes a kind of shiftiness, a subtle undercutting of responsibility. If he could just push it off for a few more hours, I would become
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