Palliative Care, Anesthesiology, and Anesthesiologists: A Special ASA Monitor

As a “newbie” anesthesiology resident in August 2004, I was assigned 1:1 with a senior thoracic anesthesiologist and supposed to spend my initial week anesthetizing ambulatory, ASA Physical Status I and II patients for such earth-shatteringly complex procedures as knee arthroscopies or cystoscopies. Abrupt staffing changes happening as they can, Friday morning instead found us shifted last minute to a thoracic OR. In brief, it was my fifth day of being an anesthesiologist and, instead of a Brahms-like schedule of “Variations and Fugue on a theme of TURP,” I instead found myself gingerly unwrapping a double lumen endotracheal tube much akin to how a premenarche teenage girl might tentatively tear open the paper packaging of a tampon. Being both kind and likely desirous of finding something that I could actually do, my attending sent me to the pre-op area to meet our first patient. Although unable to appreciate it until...