No matter how vigilant I was, another tragedy would have happened eventually. It has to—you can’t prevent the unpreventable. One brilliant consultant tells her trainees that by the time they retire, there’ll be a bus full of dead kids and kids with cerebral palsy, and that bus is going to have their name on its side. A huge number of “adverse outcomes,” as they say in hospital-ese, will occur on their watch. She tells them if they can’t deal with that, they’re in the wrong profession. Maybe if someone had said that to me a bit earlier, I’d have thought twice. Ideally, back when I was choosing
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