On Friday I had the unique experience of sitting down to a few beers with four M3’s, including my wife. When I joined them after work, the conversation started like this:

Cate: Hi! I missed you.

Ryan: Missed me? I saw you this morning.

Cate: No you didn’t.

Ryan: Oh, right…because you left at 4:50 AM.

Cate: right.

This coming from the same guy who woke up in the middle of the night last week while Cate was on call, looked at the empty bed and wondered why she was sleeping out on the couch. I’ll get used to this eventually…

Anyway, these medical folks don’t talk about sports when they get together, let me tell you. I pretty much sat there cringing and saying things like, “Oh, come ON!” in response to stories of practicing sutures on body parts that had been removed from their respective owners. Cate later explained that her suturing lab utilized a pig’s foot instead of a live person, and that this was the reason she could not look at my dinner on Friday evening…which was a huge pork chop.

Listening to their tales from the trenches of medicine, and how calmly they told them, I had to ask if there were any situations or sights that made their jaws just drop in disgust or amazement. Well, there were. And I will not write about them here.

In the end, though, I’m in awe of what Cate and her classmates see and experience in a day and how professionally they handle it. Cate is on call as I type this, and at last update, she had sutured a real person and was stepping up and answering questions about subjects she didn’t realize she knew.

More updates after dinner I’m sure. We won’t be having pork.