I know this might be more appropriate for School Me Saturday but is a valuable lesson for the free Wednesday where I talk about operating room things.

I’m taking a second summer session class about scholarly writing. And the Teams classes are Monday-Thursday. Today’s class has been about dismantling perfectionism in the academic space.

I am the only nurse/non-humanities person in the bunch. That’s okay, I’m used to it.

I took notes in my usual note-taking way. I read the assigned readings, and have little (***) offshoots where I react to the passage. This is also how I take lecture notes. But the lecture notes have an additional part. I can HIGHLIGHT my lecture notes. I have 14 different colors to choose from for the different parts I want to highlight to spark additional exploration on the theme on my own time or to emphasize a point so I can refer to it later. I have assigned each highlighter color to a different subset that I want to explore in Dispatches, explore for school, or that I want to remember because it is cool.

One of the lectures/discussions was about perfectionism that is ingrained in us as children and perpetuated through school, whatever level is attained. Acknowledging that we have all been programmed by schools/religious institutions/families to strive for perfection was the take-home. We were also tasked with thinking about ways we can break that down and dismantle it.

Granted this is an English class but I think there are applications in the operating room.

Surgeons are always striving for perfection. Always.

The cosmic joke is that they are working on imperfect bodies.

I think that surgeons can help alleviate symptoms and do amazing things through surgery, but they cannot make people perfect. I’ve read about blaming the surgeon for cancer margins that weren’t clear or not being able to “get everything”. Sometimes a human can’t fix everything.

It is foolish to think they can.

It is also foolish on their part to chase perfection and not accept that perfection is unattainable. I’ve written about how surgeons have ruined an adequate repair in the quest for the perfect repair.

We need to cut ourselves some slack. Yes, I am including surgeons in this pool.

Who said perfection was 1) attainable or 2) the ideal?

We should talk to them.