Faith in Oneself
Angela sat in her chair in front of her computer as she slowly tapped a finger on her own file. She stared at it but her mind was far in the past. Specifically, she was remembering the time back when she was just a young graduate at the beginning of her medical career.
Even from medical college, it was obvious that she was very talented, particularly in surgery. She was top of her class and became the youngest person to be accepted as a fully-qualified doctor and surgeon. Even back then, she wanted to help people but she held a certain pride in her skills and talent, certain that whoever she treated or operated on would survive.
However, the medic's mind focused on one memory in particular. It wasn't her graduation, her qualification or even her first successful operation as a surgeon. No, the memory that stood out in her mind was the first casualty on her operating table. It was an elderly woman who had long suffered from kidney failure and cancer. Angela, being the confident and brash young surgeon she was back then, took up the operation. It was 5 hours in when her patient finally breathed her last, and it was at that moment that the medic lost all her confidence. Her faith in her skills and herself was shattered with the first death of her patients. After that, she couldn't bring herself to lead another operation for a long while. Whenever she was presented with the chance, she would always turn it down with some excuse, when in fact she feared losing another patient due to her own mistakes. It took her a good year before she picked up another scalpel to perform an operation and even then it took the entire staff and intertwining circumstances to force her to do the surgery.
Angela's mind snapped back to the present as the buzzer on her table sounded again. It was a call to the operating theatre. Sitting for a bit longer, Angela looked at her hands before taking a deep breath and standing up to get herself ready for the operation. The first death of her patient had haunted her for a whole year, but now she had made her peace with it. She realized that she wasn't an angel that could save everyone, but that didn't mean she couldn't try. There had been several more deaths on her operating table since then but they had been few and far between, fortunately. Before every surgery, Angela now makes her peace with her actions in order to never be so badly affected by the death of a patient ever again.