" As medical students, we were confronted by death, suffering and the work entailed in patient care, while being simultaneously shielded from the real brunt of responsibility, though we could spot its specter. Med students spend the first two years in classrooms, socializing, studying and reading; it was easy to treat the work as a mere extension of undergraduate studies. But my girlfriend, whom I met in the first year of medical school, understood the subtext of the academics. Her capacity to love was barely finite, and a lesson to me. One night on the sofa in my apartment, while studying the reams of wavy lines that made up EKGs, she puzzled over, then correctly identified, a fatal arrhythmia. All at once, it dawned on her and she began to cry: wherever this “practice EKG” had come from, the patient had not survived. The squiggly lines on that page were more than just lines; they were ventricular fibrillation deteriorating to asystole, and they could bring you to tears. "

― ,