[aap1966]

Not my screw-up, but I was the 'target of opportunity' afterwards.

So, as a young Resident on a vascular surgery rotation we had a particularly difficult patient, let's call him Mr Joe Smith. Mr Joe Smith may have been a bitter, vindictive and deeply unpleasant man, but I am convinced to this day that everything he knew he had learnt from the Master, his wife. Nothing we did was adequate for the Smiths, particularly Mrs Smith who seemed to regard her calling in life to be torturing nursing staff and questioning the competency, loudly and regularly, of the medical staff. Mr Joe Smith needed a comparatively minor surgical procedure, but Mrs Smith was convinced that our incompetence would result in the death of her husband. An opinion she shared at volume with most of the ward. We eventually convinced her to trust her husband to our surgical skills.

At the same time in the Intensive Care Unit was another Mr Joe Smith. I never met Mr ICU Joe Smith, but he had been in ICU for sometime and, in hospital parlance, was "not doing well." At the time my Mr Joe Smith was undergoing surgery, Mr ICU Joe Smith finally succumbed to his illness.

Can you see where this is going?

The ICU resident then rang (my) Mrs Joe Smith and opened the conversation with "I'm ringing you to let you know that, AS WE EXPECTED, your husband Joe has died." The response he received down the phone line indicated that that statement was perhaps NOT as expected as he had anticipated.

Meanwhile, towards the close of (my) Mr Smith's surgery, which had gone very well, the anaesthetist took a phone call, and began to laugh. After relating the story to the theatre, the Professor of Vascular Surgery turned to me (the most junior doctor there) and said "Well, there's something for you to sort out".

27 years later I still vividly recall the subsequent conversation with Mrs Joe Smith.
How to describe it? Let's just say the barracks scene from Full Metal Jacket is not a bad analogy, albeit what I received entailed more colourful language and fewer pauses for breath.