It is a dark and stormy night, and three professionals are coming to the end of a long day. Steve became a commercial pilot 12 years ago after flying F14s for the Navy. He has been a captain for the last six. On this flight he has been flying solo for almost 14 hours, as his first and second officers have spent the majority of the trip in the bathroom or in the crew rest area with a suspicious “stomach bug.” After circling the airport for almost an hour, he has been cleared for final approach, and his visibility is close to zero. Steve’s head is telling him to divert to an alternative airport, but he’s tired, and his passengers are already angry, so he lines up for the landing. Halfway through the descent, several proximity alarms go off. Steve realizes that he has drifted to the south. He reacts quickly and narrowly misses one of the airport hotels. It was a close call but everyone gets to go home.
For as long as she can remember, Lesley wanted to be a doctor. As the chief trauma surgeon at a major hospital, she has been in her share of high-pressure situations, but today has been among the worst. She has been in the operating theater for almost 16 hours and is working on the fourth victim from a major auto accident. Lesley’s team includes nurses, an anesthesiologist, and a surgical resident, and nobody is clocking out until this patient is stabilized. Just as she thought that she was finished for the night, the patient crashes, and the monitors indicate that his blood pressure is falling rapidly. Lesley senses that he is losing blood, but from where? Immediately, the resident opens the patient’s chest cavity to reveal the problem. A seemingly minor chest injury was hiding a ruptured ascending aorta. Had she not acted as quickly as she did, the patient would not have survived.
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