The Second Great EMS What-if-we’re-Wrong-a-Thon

Image courtesy of http://associatesmind.com/2013/08/08/3-steps-to-owning-your-mistakes/

 

Close to a year ago, we attempted something nutty: for one day, we sat down, put away our pet beliefs, stepped off our soapboxes, and explored the merits of the “other side.”

Why? Aren’t we right? Well, obviously. But less important than being right or wrong is remembering (at least occasionally) that we could be wrong. We are not infallible. Our opinions may be good, but there are others that are reasonable, rational, and defensible. It’s easy to repeat the same thing so many times that we start to believe the opposing perspective is a farcical one held only by fools and madmen. Yet controversial topics don’t remain controversial in the serious circles of medicine (or anywhere else) unless there are good arguments for both sides. You can pick your position, but that doesn’t make it the only one.

Last time we had so much fun that we decided to do it again. This time our entries include…

Michael Morse (Rescuing Providence) — asks… what if community paramedicine really is the future of EMS?

Rogue Medic — asks… what if flumazenil has a valuable role for the treatment of benzodiazepine overdose?

Dale Loberger (High Performance EMS) — asks… what if emergency response times don’t really matter all that much?

Amy Eisenhauer (The EMS Siren) — wonders… whether the role of social media in EMS is such a good thing after all.

Ginger Locke — asks… what if video laryngoscopy really is the best first-pass technique for routine endotracheal intubation?

Click around and read some of these great entries. Then applaud our authors for their humility, mental agility, and overall willingness to step back from their personal dogmas and consider the alternatives.

Next time you start to open your mouth, maybe it’ll help you remember that you could be wrong, too.

The First EMS What-if-We’re-Wrong-a-Thon

oops-my-bad

 

The EMS world is full of people with opinions.

This is a contentious business, and most days, it’s hard to kick a rock without hitting two paramedics having an argument. Usually, if you listen in, you’ll realize it’s one of the golden oldies, some debate older than Johnny and Roy — fire-based vs. private ambulances, ALS- vs. BLS-dominant systems, epinephrine in cardiac arrest, the role of spinal immobilization, and so on. These are topics with two opposing camps and very little room in the middle. (Nothing’s more odious than a fence-sitter.)

The thing is, if you step back and look at most of these debates, you have to admit that there are some massively intelligent, rational, well-educated people in both camps. It’s not The Smart People on one side and A Bunch of Loonies on the other. That wouldn’t really be a controversy, would it? We’d just ignore the loonies and move on. These issues only persist because there are legitimate arguments both Yea and Nay.

But you wouldn’t think that if you waded into the trenches and took your own stand. Although you might start out “seeing both sides,” by the time you’ve done your fifteenth blog post, your tenth column, your third published review, or your 100th lecture, all hammering the same bullet-points… well, after a while, you start wondering just how any nincompoop could possibly disagree with you. You’ve been dismissing the opposition’s arguments for so long that you can no longer give them any serious consideration.

Here’s an example: I am personally very skeptical about the value of emergency department thrombolysis for ischemic stroke. That doesn’t mean I’m convinced that it’s a bad idea, but I am fairly convinced that the evidence in its favor is poor, and I believe this with sufficient ardor that I start to get a throbbing headache whenever someone advocates too loudly for tPA. On a bad day, I’ll admit that I occasionally want to throw up my hands and say, “What are these morons thinking?”

Well, these morons are hundreds of exceptionally knowledgable researchers and physicians, and what they’re thinking is that they have a slightly different perspective on the data. They are actually not stupid or insane. And that’s the key here. Maybe I’m right, maybe they’re right. But we’re both wrong if we think the debate is over, and no rational person could disagree with us. Equipoise remains; reasonable people can go either way.

The debate rages on. We’ve just picked a side.

And so, while we may spend 99% of our time waving our preferred banners, it behooves us to occasionally take pause and remember that the other side is not composed of morons, and their points have some validity. It’s good to reflect upon why, even though we’re so smart, other smart people still disagree with us. And to truly weigh and consider those reasons as viable, not just as straw-men to be refuted.

That’s why today, we’re holding…

 

The First Great EMS What-if-We’re-Wrong-a-Thon

The what?

Today, six EMS writers, bloggers, and pundits have agreed to take one of their pet issues… one of the topics they argue, espouse, teach, and defend… and try to prove the other side.

If they believe that volunteer EMS is a tool of the devil, they’ve written an earnest screed arguing why volunteers are an essential feature of modern prehospital care. If they’ve based their career on railing against unnecessary use of helicopter transportation, they’ve done their best to defend air ambulances and prove their worth.

What’s the point of this exercise?

In part, it’s for the same reason that the Catholic Church appoints “devil’s advocates,” why debate teams are expected to be equally convincing from both “pro” or “con” positions, and why computer security outfits hire “penetration testers” to try to attack their own networks. Making a serious effort to destroy your own beliefs is the best way to strengthen them. You can’t do this from within your own fortress of opinions; inside there, it’s one big echo chamber without any perspective. You need to step outside your skin, pretend you haven’t spent ten years singing the same tune, and hold a Bizarro day in order to realize what you’ve been missing.

But that’s not the most important reason for this. The most important reason is humility.

We all think we’re right about what we believe. That’s why we believe it. And that’s fine.

Yet if we cross the line into thinking we cannot possibly be wrong, we’re no longer engaging in rational debate. We’re just shouting, shouting, shouting our personal dogma. If the answer to the question, “What could convince you to change your mind?” is nothing!, that’s called religion, not reason.

Only an idiot is always right. So we asked some prominent figures from the EMS world to take a day and show us how they’re willing to be wrong.

Participating posts are linked below. Go flip through them, and applaud the authors for the courage it takes to hammer upon your own ramparts. Hopefully, you’ll be inspired to take a deep breath and acknowledge that you could be wrong too.

 

Authors

Michael Morse (Rescuing Providence) — Strong opponent of civilian Narcan (naloxone) distribution programs. He argues here why they actually might be a good idea.

Jeff Poland — Advocate of endotracheal intubation is the gold standard of airway management. He argues why we should be using supra-glottic airways as our first line intervention instead. (Guest hosted courtesy of Christopher Watford at My Variables Only Have 6 Letters.) He’s not to be confused with…

Ben Dowdy — … who argues why we should be abandoning prehospital endotracheal intubation altogether. (Guest hosted courtesy of Brooks Walsh at Mill Hill Ave Command.)

Greg Friese (EMS1) — Passionate proponent of non-traditional models of education. He argues why we should “unflip the classroom” and bring back standard lecture-based instruction for EMS training.

Vince DiGiulio (EMS 12-Lead) — Long-time believer in STEMI activation based on field ECG interpretation by well-trained paramedics. He argues why they should be transmitting their strips for physician interpretation instead.

Amy Eisenhauer (The EMS Siren) — Usually an advocate for professionalism among EMS providers; she makes a case here that sometimes, professionalism can have its downsides.

Either Lead, Learn, or Please Stop Talking

computer-punch

 

The Internet is a wonderful educational resource.

I hope this doesn’t come as a surprise to anybody, but it’s good to be reminded. As little as 20 years ago, it simply wasn’t possible to learn things in the same way or to the same extent as today, because you had to seek out the information like Indiana Jones hunting a lost jewel-encrusted kumquat. Now there are a thousand PhD’s worth of knowledge available for anyone with a modem (although it behooves us to remember that much of it is still more easily found offline, and some remains completely undigitized even now).

I have always relied heavily upon this resource, and the majority of the synapses currently rattling around my noggin wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for the ’net. I went to school, sure, but when it came to pursuing my interests and hobbies, that’s not where the money was. It even filled the bowl of my early work history — I worked in web design, various sectors of freelance writing, even as a certified locksmith, all of it made possible by self-education via an endless tap of bits and bytes.

When I first became involved in EMS, I expected that to remain true. But it wasn’t.

 

EMS 2.0: Good, bad, and ugly

Although somewhat inchoate in my early days, the EMS 2.0 movement was already getting legs, and was driven by an online community of paramedical luminaries hoping to remodel our damaged field into a modern, functioning system.

More recently, the larger arena of the medical community — with emergency medicine leading the way — has embraced FOAM, the general principle of free online medical knowledge-sharing. This is good stuff, and it’s just what we need.

But when I was a green EMT — and we all know how unprepared a freshly certified newbie can be — I turned to the web in the hopes it would help me learn, improve, and become better at my job. To some extent, it did. But I was also stymied.

Everywhere I turned I found veteran EMTs and paramedics advocating for increased education and training within our field. They seemed to passionately believe in making prehospital providers become better clinicians. Yet whenever I would ask medical questions to try and do exactly that — become better — I wouldn’t get answers. I would get further diatribes about the shortcomings of EMS education. Or suggestions to read a textbook (only rarely was one recommended). Or, if I pressed the point, the advice to go to paramedic or even medical school, because this sort of inquiry was likely to make me a fish out of water in my current profession.

Truth be told, I rarely got any answers where I didn’t dig them up myself. And I found this strange. Why would people purportedly so interested in advancing their profession seem to have so little motivation to actually do it?

Time has passed, and I have more perspective. In retrospect, the folks on the other end of the screen often didn’t know the answers to the questions I was asking, or only knew the answers in an incomplete or experiential way. Time has also brought along some actual progress, and there are more true FOAM resources out there.

Yet in the prehospital world, noisemaking still seems to predominate over knowledgemaking. For every blog post, website, forum thread, or social media group dedicated to transmitting information, there are ten whose primary occupation is posting long, repetitive screeds about the gaps in EMS education and the sorry state of our profession.

Now, everybody has a life outside of the internet (well, most everybody), and some of these people are indeed practicing what they preach. They’re teaching and precepting, writing and organizing, even lobbying to accomplish the changes we all dream of achieving.

Many others, though, seem to have endless time and energy for complaining about how dumb everyone else is, and very little for correcting that dumbness. More disturbingly, in recent times, the tone of these complaints has taken a strange turn toward arrogance. Novices foolish enough to poke out their heads are decried for not being up to the level of the complainer (interestingly, the level of the complainer is usually presumed to be the appropriate one — nothing more and nothing less). I imagine a great deal of this stems from frustration. But it certainly doesn’t contribute to a solution, nor does it speak very highly of the veterans behind the keyboards, who are missing the opportunity both to educate and to model professionalism. (Hint: there is no degree of expertise that ever makes arrogance appropriate.)

Yes, ideally we will move to a place where everybody staffing an ambulance has a strong initial education in anatomy, physiology, pathology, and medicine. Yes, this will probably entail degree-granting programs and a fundamental paradigm shift from our current model of training. But until then, there are thousands of EMTs and paramedics on the road or in the classroom with a grossly limited knowledge-base, and a significant number of them are motivated to do better than that. Are you going to blow them off until the day of rapture, or are you going to try and help?

I didn’t want to write this post, because I didn’t want to be part of the problem. This site aims to be zero percent complaining and 100% educating. But we’re just a drop in the bucket, because there are a lot of smart people out there who could do far more good than a hundred EMS Basics, and I wish they would remember it.

Murder by Checklist

Reader Steve Carroll passed along this recent case report from the Annals of Emergency Medicine.

It’s behind a paywall, so let’s summarize.

 

What happened

A young adult male was shot three times — right lower quadrant, left flank, and proximal right thigh. Both internal and external bleeding were severe. A physician bystander* tried to control it with direct pressure, to no avail.

With two hands and a lot of force, however (he weighed over 200 pounds), he was able to hold continuous, direct pressure to the upper abdomen, tamponading the aorta proximal to all three wounds.

 

Manual aortic pressure

 

Bleeding was arrested and the patient regained consciousness as long as compression was held. The bystander tried to pass the job off to another, smaller person, who was unable to provide adequate pressure.

When the scene was secured and paramedics arrived, they took over the task of aortic compression. But every time they interrupted pressure to move him to the stretcher or into the ambulance, the patient lost consciousness again. Finally en route, “it was abandoned to obtain vital signs, intravenous access, and a cervical collar.”

The result?

Within minutes, the patient again bled externally and became unresponsive. Four minutes into the 9-minute transfer, he had a pulseless electrical activity cardiac arrest, presumed a result of severe hypovolemia. Advanced cardiac life support resuscitation was initiated and continued for the remaining 5-minute transfer to the ED.

The patient did not survive.

 

When the cookbook goes bad

The idea of aortic compression is fascinating, but I don’t think it’s the most important lesson to this story.

Much has been said about the drawbacks of rigidly prescriptive protocol-based practice in EMS. But one could argue that our standard teachings allow for you to defer interventions like IV access if you’re caught up preventing hemorrhage. Like they say, sometimes you never get past the ABCs.

The problem here is not necessarily the protocols or the training. It’s the culture. And it’s not just us, because you see similar behavior in the hospital and in other domains.

It’s the idea that certain things just need to be done, regardless of their appropriateness for the patient. It’s the idea that certain patients come with a checklist of actions that need to be dealt with before you arrive at the ED. Doesn’t matter when. Doesn’t matter if they matter.

It’s this reasoning: “If I deliver a trauma patient without a collar, vital signs, and two large-bore IVs, the ER is going to tear me a new one.”

In other words, if you don’t get through the checklist, that’s your fault. But if the patient dies, that’s nobody’s fault.

From the outside, this doesn’t make much sense, because it has nothing to do with the patient’s pathology and what might help them. It has everything to do with the relationship between the paramedic and the ER, or the paramedic and the CQI staff, or the paramedic and the regional medical direction.

Because we work alone out there, without anybody directly overseeing our practice, the only time our actions are judged is when we drop off the patient. Which has led many of us to prioritize the appearance of “the package.” Not the care we deliver on scene or en route. Just the way things look when we arrive.

That’s why crews have idled in ED ambulance bays trying over and over to “get the tube” before unloading. That’s why we’ve had patients walk to the ambulance, climb inside, and sit down, only to be strapped down to a board.

And that’s why we’ve let people bleed to death while we record their blood pressure and needle a vein.

It’s okay to do our ritual checklist-driven dance for the routine patients, because that’s what checklists are for; all the little things that seem like a good idea when there’s time and resources to achieve them. But there’s something deeply wrong when you turn away from something critical — something lifesaving — something that actually helps — in order to achieve some bullshit that doesn’t matter one bit.

If you stop tamponading a wound to place a cervical collar, that cervical collar killed the patient. If you stop chest compressions to intubate, that tube killed the patient. If you delay transport in penetrating trauma to find an IV, that IV killed the patient.

No, let’s be honest. If you do those things, you killed the patient.

Do what actually matters for the patient in front of you. Nobody will ever criticize you for it, and if they do, they are not someone whose criticism should bother you. The only thing that should bother you is killing people while you finish your checklist.

 

* Correction: the bystander who intervened was not a physician, but “MD” (Matthew Douma), the lead author, who is an RN. — Editor, 7/22/14

Child-rearing and You

Monkey Training School

 

Despite my forays into educational writing like this, I have never been an FTO.

Field Training Officers or preceptors are responsible for training and supervising new hires, who typically work for several weeks as an additional third crewmember (or “third rider”) while learning the ropes. For various reasons, I’m not sure I’d be good at this, and I’ve never pursued it. On the other hand, regardless of what I want to pursue, I’ve never been able to avoid working with new partners.

By “new,” I mean minty-green new — folks who have never worked on an ambulance, or in some cases, never worked a job at all. Since this kind of EMT is usually paired with a fairly senior partner early on — and since not many people stick with this job long enough to be “senior” — if you’ve been doing this for a few years, you’ll usually wind up with a new guy sitting next to you. It is what it is.

Standard operating procedure is to drink lots of coffee, grumble, boss them around, and let them gradually absorb whatever useful knowledge you inadvertently leak out. Unfortunately, this is both stressful for the new guy, and something less than fully enriching; they learn as many bad habits as good practices, and become jaded faster than they become competent.

I am not a gifted teacher when it comes to in-person training. But like most things in this job, by learning it the hard way, I’ve developed some useful insights. So here are a few pointers for bringing along your new guy and molding them into the very bestest EMT they can be.

 

Make your expectations clear

For you, it’s Wednesday, you’re tired, and for some reason your left knee keeps clicking. But for them, it’s their first day on an ambulance, and everything is new.

The best thing you can do is to clarify how this game is going to work. What’s going to happen when you walk into a call? How are you going to assign responsibility? What do they know, what do they need to know, and how will that process occur?

I once punched in to find a partner I hadn’t met before. Ten minutes into checking the truck, we got sent out to a seizure at the department store. I drove, she teched. But each time I tried to let her “do her thing,” she just froze like a deer in headlights. Turned out, this was the first shift she’d worked — ever — and her entire training period had been spent running routine transfers. She wasn’t just unpracticed, she hadn’t even seen most of what takes place on an emergency call, never mind attempted it.

Although you could call this a gross failure of the training process (I did), the underlying lesson is that you never know what you’re dealing with. Your partner may have years of experience at another service; he may have just finished high school and never worked a full-time job; he might be a new EMT, but just spent twenty years as a veteran CNA. Maybe he’s a few months in, comfortable with certain situations, but wholly new to others. You need to know where they’re coming from. Not only will they resent the stress and panic induced by stranding them when they don’t know what to do, but they’re just as likely to resent your butting-in (whether explaining something or actually taking over) when they do know what to do; the dividing line can be nearly invisible, but is very real.

Some points to consider:

  • Who drives? Many seniors tend to do most of the driving while their newbie techs in back. The theory here is that you should “learn the back before you learn the front” — that is, patient care before driving and navigation. I find this arbitrary, since driving is as important to this job (and sometimes as difficult to do well) as anything else. It’s reasonable to focus on one skillset before developing the other, but I think driving should start early, because eventually they’re going to be forced into it anyway (driving for an ALS unit, perhaps), and they need to be ready. Start almost immediately by letting them drive between calls on routine matters; this acclimates them to handling the ambulance and navigating your service area. Once they’ve figured that out, they can do some emergency driving on responses. When you’re comfortable they can safely get from Point A to Point B, let them drive while occupied with patients — if they know where they’re going, or at least have a reliable GPS. But don’t throw them into this without some instruction on how to drive smoothly and safely, or you’ll spend the trip getting angry while you slide around the bench, and they won’t know why.
  • Who does what on emergency scenes? Working with experienced partners, I cleave to the golden rule: the tech runs the call, while the driver shuts up and helps out. This makes it easy to avoid stepping on each other’s toes or going different ways. If you’re the tech and your new partner is driving, this still works, because you’ll make the calls and tell them what to do, and they can watch your amazing wizardry in action. But what if they’re the tech? I always try to let them take the reins, but if they pulled the tags off their first uniform yesterday, they’re probably just going to stand there. I give ’em a few beats and then take over (you can’t stand there forever staring at the patient). But between calls, go over what needs to happen, and try to gradually work them toward familiarity with their role.
  • How will feedback be given? Like in any relationship, communication is only ever bad when it’s not undertaken promptly and directly. From day one, make it clear that if they ever have a question, they should ask it (at the appropriate time); if they’re ever uncertain, they should request assistance (you’ll only be mad when they screw up because they didn’t ask); and if they want help, you want to provide it. Conversely, explain that after calls you’ll give suggestions and feedback, which should be taken constructively; they have a lot to learn and must embrace that. If you tend to adopt a direct or brusque manner, as many of us do, warn them that it’s not personal and you’re not rebuking them, you’re just too old and tired to sugarcoat everything. Reassure them that you’ll never talk shit to others when they mess up; when anybody asks, you’ll just make vague remarks like “oh yeah, he’s good.” Above all, remind them that although you’re here to support them, patient care comes first, so there will be times when “teachable moments” need to take a back seat.

 

Practice, Practice, Practice

The main problem for most new folks isn’t “knowledge,” it’s application. They may have memorized the EMT textbook (although that book, of course, is a little light), but there are a thousand tiny things that comprise the everyday functioning of this job, and they know none of it.

That’s one of the goals behind Scenarioville. To get good at this job, you need practice. And even in a busy system, in a given week you may only do one or two seizures, or drunks, or chest pains, or any other type of call, with a lot of other stuff in between. If they’re weak with something, it takes a long time to to practice enough to get any better.

You can fill that gap with drills, as realistic as possible. In your downtime, make ’em go through the paces. Trouble giving radio patches? Hand ’em the mic (turn it off first) and have ’em pretend they’re talking to the hospital, complete with pressing the right buttons and hearing static-filled replies from you. Do they need to practice driving? Find a parking lot and give them tasks to accomplish, such as backing in a straight line, turning corners, or navigating tight gaps. Bad at lifting? Give ’em workout homework (get thee to the gym and start deadlifting!). Watched them fumble with a skill? Make ’em do it: take a blood pressure off you (with various locations, sizes, and methods), assemble the nebulizer or apply a dressing, or execute a thorough neuro, abdominal, or trauma assessment. In some cases verbalizing a skill is all you can manage, but whenever possible, do it for real; a disposable neb is a small cost to pay for skill mastery, and the first time they open the package shouldn’t be on a sick person.

If they’re interested, you can certainly chat about deeper medical topics like V/Q mismatching and the citric acid cycle. But they can get that from a book. When it comes to practice, something more interactive is needed. Often, I’ll do verbal scenarios, describing a call and forcing them to make decisions as they go. Nothing is quite as frightening as a totally unscripted, unstructured situation, where you stop and stare and ask, “What do you do?” And don’t let them get away with vague invocations like “scene safety” or “manage the airway”; force them to describe exactly what they mean. Oh, you’ll check for a pulse? How? Where? What are you looking for? Okay, where’s that piece of equipment? How do you size it? Are you sure we’ve got one?

History-taking is the most difficult skill to acquire. Force them to talk directly to you as if you were the patient, because they need to be comfortable with that. With experience, you develop a patter, and you have go-to lines at each juncture — what you say in greeting, what to ask for certain complaints, how to unpack certain responses. They haven’t acquired those moves yet, but they need to develop them, so by presenting them with those situations in a practice setting, they have a low-stress way to hone their own tools.

Every new partner I’ve had has gone through a similar learning curve. At first, they don’t know anything. After a while, the first things they get comfortable with are the “skills,” simple, concrete tasks they know how to execute. As a result, when they walk into a scene and don’t know what to do, they immediately start doing whatever task they’ve mastered — taking a blood pressure, writing down meds, etc. The challenge is getting them to move beyond rote psychomotor skills to the nuanced business of actually approaching the patient, greeting them, assessing them medically with questions and focused physical examination, deciding what’s wrong, and making decisions accordingly. This is tough, and occasionally I’ve had to take things away from people (cuffs, glucometers, nasal cannulas, pens) so they couldn’t “hide” in them.

In the end, the key to mastery is repetition. A single repetition is nothing. When the two of you run a call and you realize they need to practice something, debrief afterward by discussing the details, make them describe the considerations and goals, and spend the rest of the day verbalizing scenarios similar to the call you did. Once they’re absolutely sick of it, you’re starting to make progress, because boredom means they know what to do, and that’s the whole idea.

 

Managing your own blood pressure

One of the biggest challenges, of course, is not losing your mind.

Even smart students will sometimes drive you out of your gourd. Usually, this is because they don’t know something you figure they should. In fact, everybody should know that. In fact, how in god’s name can you be old enough to drive a car without being able to figure this out? It’s common sense!

The trouble is, it isn’t common sense. When you started out, you had to learn it. But that was so long ago, you’ve forgotten how much you originally had to learn; many of the routine aspects of the job are now second-nature to you. But they’re not second nature to your partner; he has to consciously learn them all, and think about them when he does them, and he can only internalize so many at a time. So while he’s trying to remember to do X, Y, and Z, he might forget A and B. Even if A is something that he does know. And maybe he never even learned C. See?

When they develop confidence, they improve exponentially, because once they relax they can actually think; most dumb stuff is the result of blind panic. (The secret of veteran providers is that they often don’t know what to do, but they use their noodle and do what makes sense. This isn’t a difficult skill, but you can’t do it while holding your breath.)

My own pet peeve is when I tell ’em something, and next week tell ’em again, and six months later I swear I’m telling ’em the same thing, and they’re staring at me like they’ve never heard it. Ain’t you listening to me, Jethro? Well, they are listening. But I’ve also been talking a whole lot, and between the V/Q mismatches and everything else, they’re not going to remember all of it; it’s going in one ear and most of it out the other. So either I can slow the flow a little, or expect to repeat myself. Either way, my problem, not theirs.

The point is that there’s a great deal to learn just to master the basics of this job, never mind acquiring true clinical acumen. Combined with the fact that many new hires are young, and haven’t developed the general problem-solving skills that only come with years and failures and overall life experience (being a good employee, talking to other humans, empathizing with suffering, avoiding dangerous situations, and so on), and you get a perfectly intelligent person who sometimes seems like they’ve had a lobotomy.

Take deep breaths, try to remember what it was like when you were in their shoes… and warn them early that you will occasionally get fed up, sometimes act short, and at the 15th hour of a shift, will not always be gentle Grandpa Patience. Advise them that you’re not perfect and will not always act out the principles you espouse. And request that, although you like to teach and you like your job, when you’ve been working for 60 hours straight you may need some quiet time.

Most of all, look around at all your competent coworkers who once upon a time made their partners pull out their hair and ask whether they were working with a trained monkey. Because it does get better, and years ago, that monkey was you.