Today, I was a doctor

For an hour, I had an MD behind my name.

I slipped on a long white coat, became a real doctor, and saw a patient.

This all started when our awesome ethics facilitator realized we had no idea what an ECMO (extra-corporal membrane oxygenation) machine was. We had been debating end of life care, agreeing that it was best to pull life support for our hypothetical patient.

"Do you guys know what ECMO is?"

Did we actually know what it would mean to take away the only thing keeping a fellow human alive? Would we be able to pull life support when it was time?

"No? Let's go see!"

We were dressed in jeans and sandals. Great for the weather outside. Not exactly professional.

"Oh wait...none of you have white coats. Okay, we can fix that."

So she leads us to the ICU floor, finds this restricted area and punches in a code, and accesses all the spare white coats of all the ICU attendings. I remember we were all looking furtively around in case someone walks in on us.

After she made sure we all got coats of attendings that weren't on...she waltz us onto the floor, and shows us what real medicine looks like.

It looks like a precious little infant sprawled on a gurney with tubes as wide as her neck attached directly to her heart that did not beat. It looks like two young parents looking apprehensively at the 9 "doctors" in long coats crowded around a bank of monitors that a dedicated nurse must attend to 24/7. It looks like hope, shaped like tiny spikes of a heart the size of your nose finding the will to beat.

I just hope she didn't look down and see all of our toes peeking out under shorts, jeans, and flip flops...