Sleep Deprivation The OR is a silent room. My surgical scrubs feel warm, like a pair of comfy pajamas. I sit, holding tools, while the surgeon meticulously dissects the patient's. It's a surgery I've assisted on dozens of times before. I blink and try to remember how long I have been in here. It seems like it has been forever since I have arrived at the hospital. In fact, it's been more than thirty hours since my shift started. During this past day and a half, I've logged more than fifteen hours in the OR and had no sleep in-between. My eyelids feel heavy, as if being pulled down by an invisible force. I begin shaking my knee up and down, an attempt to keep myself awake. My knee stops, and the Heaviness returns to my eyelids. Five minutes …show more content…
One example would be in the article A Tale of Two Addicts: Freud, Halsted and Cocaine by Ira Flatow, who is a science correspondent and award-winning TV journalist. In this article he talks about the overworked, sleep-deprived doctor valiantly saving lives is an archetype that is deeply rooted in the culture of physician training. William Halsted, who was the first chief of surgery at Johns Hopkins in the 1890s and one of the founders of modern medical training, required his residents to be on call 362 days a year, and for almost the next hundred years the attitude of the medical establishment was more or less the same. Not that far into Halsted’s career did they find out that Halsted fueled his manic work ethic with cocaine. The way Halsted first go interested in cocaine was when he read Freud's very famous paper on cocaine. It talked about how you can use cocaine on your patients and this interested Halsted. Sadly like most doctors back then, they uses it on themselves. Halsted read various little case reports in some journals about how great cocaine was for fighting off depression or fatigue. This cocaine helped him greatly because he was now able to work none stop and have a crazy work load and not be tired. Soon he stopped going to the hospital. He stopped going to meetings. He stopped writing. The cocaine helped him with working none stop and getting no sleep for a while but it wasn’t a cure for sleep deprivation. There was a case where he was called down to see a patient at the Bellevue Hospital. It was a serious fracture, a leg fracture in a man who fell off the roof of a building. And Halsted was quite the expert at repairing these types of injuries. The bone was literally sticking out of his leg and it would have been horrible for the man if nobody fixed it soon. Halsted was so high on cocaine that he left and said that he cannot operate on this man, then went home and