Lessons From a Previous Life
I am a late entrant to the world of medicine, having spent 15 years in the world of finance where I worked as a stock and bond trader, venture capitalist, and investment banker. And to answer the question I get from most of my current colleagues: yes, those are actually different things.
On one recent overnight shift, we had a patient brought in by police on “wet” — marijuana laced with PCP — which is a particularly popular drug in Philadelphia these days. After an hour or so of howling like a werewolf from the stretcher, where he was in four-point restraints, the patient calmed down enough to ask for water.
Unfortunately he asked the way a three-year-old asks for something, repeating the words “Can I have water?” in such a rapid and repetitive fashion that the words quickly lost all recognizable form, and he even began to get them in the wrong order. In hopes of calming, and more importantly quieting down the patient, I got a cup of water and held it while he drank. As I returned to the nurses’ station, one of my fellow residents laughed and asked how I came from flying around the world in business class and arranging billion dollar deals to holding a Dixie cup while some knucklehead on PCP drank from it.
The truth is that the gaps between my old world and my new one are not all that wide. There are a few truisms that have held through all my careers.
Introduction
I am a late entrant to the world of medicine, having spent 15 years in the world of finance where I worked as a stock and bond trader, venture capitalist, and investment banker. And to answer the question I get from most of my current colleagues: yes, those are actually different things.
On one recent overnight shift, we had a patient brought in by police on “wet” — marijuana laced with PCP — which is a particularly popular drug in Philadelphia these days. After an hour or so of howling like a werewolf from the stretcher, where he was in four-point restraints, the patient calmed down enough to ask for water.
Unfortunately he asked the way a three-year-old asks for something, repeating the words “Can I have water?” in such a rapid and repetitive fashion that the words quickly lost all recognizable form, and he even began to get them in the wrong order. In hopes of calming, and more importantly quieting down the patient, I got a cup of water and held it while he drank. As I returned to the nurses’ station, one of my fellow residents laughed and asked how I came from flying around the world in business class and arranging billion dollar deals to holding a Dixie cup while some knucklehead on PCP drank from it.
The truth is that the gaps between my old world and my new one are not all that wide. There are a few truisms that have held through all my careers.