The Loneliness of Surgical Training
“Morning and evening
Someone waits at Matsushima!
One-sided love.”
— Matsuo Bashō
Surgical training often feels like this haiku. A resident waits morning and evening — outside operating rooms, beside hospital beds, near the phone during call nights — longing not for romance, but for competence, recognition, and mastery. The relationship is painfully one-sided. Surgery demands everything: sleep, youth, relationships, ego, even health. And in return it gives only brief moments — a successful incision, a senior’s nod, a patient surviving against odds. Yet the trainee keeps returning every morning and evening, because like Bashō’s lonely figure at Matsushima, surgeons too are sustained by devotion to something that may never fully love them back.
