The nurse's voice on the phone is desperate, but young Dr. Peters, in his first weeks of internship, is only bone-tired and a little afraid. He has forgotten when he last slept. Yet he knows that in the coming hours he will have to make life-or-death decisions regarding patients, assist contemptuous surgeons in the operating room, deal with nurses who may know more than he does, cope with worried relatives and friends of the injured and ill, and pretend at all times to be what he has not yet become--a fully qualified doctor.

This book is about what happens to a young intern as he goes through the year that promises to make him into a doctor, and threatens to destroy him as a human being--