John Harris in The Guardian:
Twenty years ago, Peter Attia was working as a trainee surgeon at Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore, where he saved countless people facing what he calls “fast death”. “I trained in a very, very violent city,” he tells me. “We were probably averaging 15 or 16 people a day getting shot or stabbed. And, you know, that’s when surgeons can save your life. We’re really good at that.”
What got to him, he says, were the people he treated who were in the midst of dying much more slowly. “All the people with cardiovascular disease, all the people with cancer: we were far less effective at saving those people. We could delay death a little bit, but we weren’t bending the arc of their lives.” Attia and his colleagues often worked 24-hour shifts, leaving him starved of sleep. When he managed to get some rest, he had an endlessly recurring dream, in which he found himself in the middle of the city, holding a padded basket and staring up at a nearby building. Eggs rained down on him, and though he tried to catch as many as he could, most of them inevitably smashed on the pavement.
More here.