“did you save any lives today?”
lay people love asking this flippantly. we sometimes stop people from dying. it is relatively rare, however, to catch someone actively dying in real-time and stop that from happening single handedly.
for one, it's never a one-handed activity.
rarely, too, is it ever one thing that's gone wrong with one simple fix. how many times have I given a bolus of propofol or prescribed magnesium to buy some time?
the one time I can say I perhaps saved someone's life was when I saw someone going into anaphylaxis fulminantly and gave them adrenaline.