Your Life If You Chose To Be an Anesthesiologist

You were 8. A woman in a blue cap held a cherry-flavored mask over your face and told you to count backwards from ten. You made it to seven. Time stopped being a thing that exists. This is what choosing anesthesia for the lifestyle actually looks like — fourteen years of training, $312,000 in debt, the resident who didn't show up Monday and whose name was off the schedule by Wednesday, the partner who didn't show up Tuesday and what the chief didn't have to say, and the JAMA odds ratio nobody tells you about until you are already in the room. Every level. Every salary. Every Monday morning you signed the controlled-substance log and didn't say a word.