Typical Day
Dr. Brianna Sturgeon is up and at 'em at 5:00AM, ready for another long and demanding day at Shmoop General. She drinks a glass of juice (no coffee, as she doesn't want her hands shaking during an operation), gobbles down a couple of naturally high-protein hard-boiled eggs, and is on her way.
After checking her emails, she does her pre-op rounds, speaking with both of the patients who are to have their brains operated on that day. (One of her patients actually sought medical help after a friend of his sarcastically suggested that he should get his head examined. Good thing he took him seriously.)
After consulting her patients' charts and explaining that she saw nothing wrong with his feet, she says that she's going to send him home.
"But Doc," the patient protests, "it's my head."
"Ah!"Brianna flips the chart over and says, "Oh, I see—yes—you need surgery." (The great ones never lose their sense of humor. Brianna has a poster from the "This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs" commercial hanging on her office wall.)
She consults with the anesthesiologist and makes sure all systems are go. Her first operation is the removal of a brain tumor. She and her team assemble in the O.R. at 8:00AM, and once the patient has been put under by the anesthesiologist, they get the party started. It's kind of a lame party—the surgery takes just over five hours, without a single coffee or whiz break in the middle of it. You can't exactly prop someone's skull flap open with a paperweight while you go to read Stream the River by I.P. Freely.
However, the "party" is ultimately a successful one. After the tumor is removed and the patient is sewn up, Dr. Sturgeon grabs lunch in the hospital cafeteria—she likes the overcooked spaghetti mash after she's done brain tumor ops for some reason—then prepares for her second surgery.
At 3:00PM, she meets with her team in the O.R. and her second patient is wheeled in—this one for a cerebral aneurysm that will require surgical clipping. After making a joke about bringing in the hacksaw while pretending the patient is already anesthetized, the patient is actually put under, and Dr. Sturgeon performs a craniotomy to expose the aneurysm.
The clip is applied, the skull is screwed back together, the muscles and skin are sutured, and lickety-split—all done after only six and a halfhours. Frank N. Stein, eat your heart out.
At 10:15PM, the good doctor pops into her office for a skinny minute to respond to a few emails, then hops in her Mercedes and heads to her enormous home. She'll be back in seemingly no time to lather, rinse, repeat all over again.