We All Make Mistakes Essay

Mistakes allow us to benefit from our past and to strengthen our future. When you’re young, you make a lot of blunders that don’t seem to be wrong at all. That’s exactly what happened to me, and this turned out to be no different from the case of Atul Gawande, as he shares in his article ’When Doctors Make Mistakes.’ Despite the errors that are an unavoidable part of every Tom, Dick, and Harry’s life, they give us the strength to make it right again and, inevitably, to brighten up our prospects. Mistakes are an inevitable part of everybody’s life irrespective of social status, profession, and age. Atul Gawande which he shares in his article ‘When Doctors make Mistakes.’ In spite of mistakes being an inevitable part of every Tom, Dick, and Harry’s life, they give us the power to make things right again and eventually brighten up our prospect.

Mistakes are an inevitable part of everybody’s life irrespective of the social status, profession and age. Atul Gawande takes us through a past event where he made a grave mistake which could have cost the life of a patient. The doctor was attending to a patient when all of a sudden, his beeper goes off and he is needed in the emergency room for a trauma code. They made some efforts to intubate the patient on discovering that he had developed breathing difficulties. Having carried out several unsuccessful attempts decided to perform an emergency tracheostomy, a procedure that he was neither skilled in nor had the experience, to save a looming loss of brain function. However, events turn awful when blood unexpectedly starts flowing into the incision making it difficult to see. As he puts it, “I felt for the bony prominence of the thyroid cartilage. But I couldn’t feel anything through the rolls of fat. I was beset by uncertainty-where should I cut? Should I make a horizontal or vertical incision? And I hated myself for it. Surgeons never dithered, and I was dithering” (Gawande 655). A surgeon by the name Ball came in to offer help and instructed and instructed another doctor to try and intubate the patient again, a similar mistake. Gawande the stated, ”Essentially he was admitting my failure. Trying an oral intubation again was pointless just something to do instead of watching her die. I was stricken, and concentrated on doing chest compressions, not looking at anyone. It was over, I thought” (Gawande 656).

Mistakes give us the power to make things right again. Despite Gawande making a grave mistake that could have resulted in the death of the patient, his mistake served as a lesson to other surgeons who reviewed the events, at the weekly M. & M. conference and pledged solutions to prevent those mistakes from happening again. Gawande stated, ”The successful M. & M. presentation inevitably involves a particular elision of detail and a lot of passive verbs. No one screws up a cricothyroidotomy. Instead, ”a cricoidotomy was attempted without success.” the message, however, was not lost on anyone” (Gawande 660). In a similar manner, I had cheated on my girlfriend, a mistake that terminated my relationship in addition to hurting her very much. Both doctor Gwanade and I had learned from our mistakes.

Learning from our mistakes made improved our future. Making the mistakes did not mean the end of our lives but the begging of a brighter prospect. Gawande stated, ”There are all sorts of reasons that it would be wrong to take my license away or take me to court. These reasons do not absolve me.”(Gawande 669). Cheating on my girlfriend brought down my life. I indulged in bad habits that nearly took away my life. Waking up in a hospital bed became a big inspiration to me such that I valued my life more than before.

In conclusion, mistakes are bound to happen in the life of each person. Nonetheless, these slips offer us the opportunity and energy to learn and avoid falling into similar faults again. What is more, they end up making us better people and make our future livelier.

Works Cited

Gawande, Atul. ”When Doctors Make Mistakes.“ The New Yorker, 1 Feb. 1999, www.newyorker.com/magazine/1999/02/01/when-doctors-make-mistakes.