Anaesthetics is the art of creating coma, and isn't England a wonderful country to learn it?  All the patients I meet want to be put to sleep. With me left awake to hold the fort, and here's where a subtle difference with general practice creeps in. Generally, people come to the doctor with an ailment. 'The patient is the one with the disease', it says in The House of God. The problem has been discussed with the GP and the solution with the surgeon. ' Just knock me out, doc' is what's left for the anaesthetist. So there I stand with my theatre hat on, and three minutes later the patient has stopped breathing for the first time since leaving the womb fifty years ago. With a blood pressure that's at baby-level too. It's actually next door to being dead, and the responsibility for keeping things on this side of the blue tunnel is suddenly MINE.  I'm the one with the problem! 

It's an old truism  that anaesthesia is 99% boredom spiced with one percent havoc. But I'm a beginner, and the percentages are the other way round. 

Kees