Why Do Surgeons Have Such Big Egos?

Aaron Singh -- Last week I went to hospital. (pause for collective gasps!) I know, I know, I study in a university famous for being strictly traditional and hence not allowing pre-clinical medics anywhere near patients for the first three years. How then, you ask, did I get into a hospital? Did I, in a moment of sheer desperation, dress up as a nurse? Did I slip on some scrubs and do my best J.D. impersonation? Or did I, completely fed up of mindlessly stuffing obscure biochemical details into my brain, walk into the middle of the street, get hit by a car and get sent to A&E (the British version of the ER)?

I wish I could say that I did (it’d certainly increase the hit count on this page), but nope, the answer is much more mundane. In an attempt to pacify clinical-exposure-hungry and whiny students like me, the University has introduced a Preparing for Patients component of the course, which allows us to go interview patients in hospital once a year. It’s to improve our communications skills, and seeing how fantastically excellent I am at communicating my feelings without launching into a full-blown rant, it seems like a very good idea to prevent deprived students from beating up (or more likely getting beaten up by) patients in their 4th year.

So it was that at an insanely early hour, we were sipping coffee in the hospital cafeteria, waiting for our consultant to show up, and being given a rare opportunity to just sit back and observe how a hospital operates. There we were, so ridiculously well-dressed that any half-starved idiot sauntering by could’ve told that we were medical students. (I mean seriously, how many doctors do you see walking around hospitals wearing suits?) It was then that I noticed you could actually tell what sort of doctor the person walking by was, simply by the way they looked at you. Some of them walked past and smiled when we caught their gaze. Some of them were staring off into the distance, lost in thought, and didn’t even notice the crowd of curious well-dressed medics gawking in the cafeteria.

And then there were the surgeons.

These were the ones who walked past you with a sense of purpose, with an expression that sent lesser medical personnel scurrying out of their paths in terror, and with eyes whose gaze could physically melt medical students if you weren’t careful. Several walked past us, instantly recognizable, and those who bothered to look at us did so with a disdainful expression, dismissing our existence as being too trivial to bother their exalted minds. They were Lords of their Domain; entire operating theatres were built as shrines to their greatness. Why shouldn’t they walk around as if they owned the place?

I’ve always wondered why surgeons seem to be more affected by the famous God complex that seems so prevalent in the medical profession. Recently, my cousin brother underwent surgery, as I talked about in my previous post, and the surgeon who operated on him, whilst perfectly competent, also demonstrated this uppity demeanour. She strode into the OT (fashionably late) without seeing him pre-op, and didn’t even check on him post-op. During the surgery she didn’t bother to reassure him; it was the nurses who did this.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not slagging surgeons. I know many fantastic surgeons, and hope to be one myself someday. I just think they could tone down their ego sometimes. Not all ego is bad; I’m a Donald Trump fan and he’s known for espousing the belief that a healthy ego leads to a higher quality of work. And this is true as long as it drives surgeons (and indeed any other worker) to perform better, but it’s completely unnecessary when it causes them to ignore patients, shout at nurses and look down on doctors from non-surgical specialties. And abuse medical patients. ESPECIALLY when they abuse medical patients. But that’s an embarrassing story best saved for another day…