Error

I don't think there's anything we can joke about high-stakes medicine in hospital, though we can think about dark joke. The medical drama novel Monday Mornings by Sanjay Gupta turns out to be a fast-paced one with a bomb ticking on each page. 

The darkest joke is the Morbidity and Mortality conference, often known as M&M, that haunts surgeons in a fictional hospital. There are all sorts of behind-the-curtain errors being unmasked during M&M. One surgeon missed to take a family history and missed a diagnosis of inherited bleeding disorder before cutting open the brain of an eleven-year-old boy. The boy died from uncontrollable bleeding on the surgery table, sooner than he would have died from his brain tumour.

The second doctor, much more junior than the first one, was being sued after she accidentally nicked the olfactory nerve of a chef during removal of the patient's meningioma. The hospital chief decided to terminate the contract of the young doctor, effective immediately. Alas, the boss insisted to do so, even when the colleagues were erupting with anger. "Hospitals are supposed to protect their people, not toss them when there are problems." 

That's no joke. Medicine is a human profession. The medical errors are alwsys there, waiting for the moment, waiting for human frailty. Doctors – everyone, really – make mistakes. The darkest joke from the novel is when the hospital chief made the mistake of cutting open the brain of a patient on the wrong side. 

Mistakes are a fact of life, I want to say. It is the response to the error that counts, the American educator Nikki Giovanni said.