Its Okay to Learn

   One of the things I love about ballet is that its okay to screw up- in fact I do it with every plie, every tendu, and certainly every pirouette. Everyone knows that professionals are not perfect 100% of the time, so we are all starting from this position of trying to attain perfection. But the fact that we do not attain  perfection is a given and usually we don't get upset about not having a perfect class or performance or whatever.  When teachers correct us in class they are validating our attempt to improve- and usually they get really excited when we do improve.
    Surgical training is not this way. There is no room for imperfection because the stakes are so much higher. My surgical teachers have no praise for improvement- they just let me know when I have screwed up and that imperfections are not acceptable. This is a very disheartening way to learn.
   Surgery and ballet both involve the pursuit of perfection but there is an expectation of actually achieving perfection in surgery  and that expectation does not exist in any art form- even though medicine is often described as both an art and a science. Why is there this expectation in surgery? Why can't we allow for human imperfections?

 Because no one wants an imperfect machine cutting on  grandma.

   Expectations of surgeons drive us to become almost robotic in our performance of surgery. This sounds crazy when you think about the fact that you have an imperfect machine (the surgeon) working on another imperfect machine (the patient) and we expect perfect and predictable results every time! Surgeons already need a certain amount of dissociation in order to actually hammer into live people, and this expectation of a robotic performance drives away our humanity even more. Then we are expected to put on our human faces again when we talk to patients who are awake. If we screw up in either area we risk getting sued. Thank goodness that most people are willing to accept a little imperfection!

And so when I go to class this week I am thankful that  no one dies or sues me when I fall over midway though adagio. That alone is worth way more than the $15 I pay for class.