support for "being mortal" is provided by the john and wauna harman foundation. (sirens blaring) >> atul gawande: i've been a surgeon for more than a decade now. in medicine, your first fear as a doctor is that you're supposed to be able to fix a problem, and our anxieties include wanting to seem competent, and to us competent means "i can fix this." in fact there's often a kind of implicit promise, "i'm going to be able to fix this, i'm going to certainly give you the best shot you can have. nobody could have given you a better shot." and then when things aren't working, part of your anxiety is, was there something i missed, was there anything else i could have done? when i started out in my training in surgery, you discover that all the stuff you learned about in the books in medical school is really just a tiny little bit of what it means to be good at doing our jobs. it's not just about how smart you are anymore as a doctor, it's about how you have to be able to work with teams, and how mistakes get made and how you handle them, and how you learn. among the m