Welcome to Chasing Life.

This is hard to believe, but I finished medical school back in 1993, 32 years ago.

I've spent more than half my life now as a physician.

I was 24 years old at the time.

I'm in my mid-50s now. It is really remarkable to reflect upon

a lot of my formative years in hospitals. During my neurosurgery training, the hours were

relentless, sometimes more than 100 hours every week. Spent a lot of time in operating rooms.

Spent a lot of time in emergency rooms. Spent a lot of time in emergency rooms.

And I got to tell you, there's nowhere else quite like it. You never know what's going to walk through the door in an emergency room. You can go from having a relatively quiet shift to complete

pandemonium within minutes, sometimes within seconds.

You have to work with teams, people that you are shoulder to shoulder with as you're trying to

revive patients who've come in after gunshot wounds, after car accidents, after some sort of trauma,

after heart attacks, strokes, you name it.

The sounds, the rapid pace of the work, the never-ending line of patients, you know that every

day, lives are going to be saved, and sometimes lives will be lost.

Now, the thing about doing those types of shows for television is that most doctors and nurses have a little bit of an allergy to that.

They will be the first to tell you that, look, my world is nothing like what you see on TV.

And that's because medicine isn't glamorous.

Scrubs get really dirty.

Emergency rooms get really crowded.

Sometimes it's hard to take care of patients the way that you want to take care of patients.

There is exhaustion.

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