So much of medical education is based on the following dictum: "see one, do one, teach one."

Drawing blood. Lancing an abscess. Suturing a laceration. Sticking a needle into the jugular vein.

Like most doctors in training, I saw one, then did one, then taught one. 

The first time I had to do something for the first time, I was terrified. Somehow, you gotta just feel the fear and do it anyway. In my case, it was drawing blood on a cranky old guy in the Bronx who'd been stuck by so many bumbling medical students that he took a sort of pride in his terrible veins and irascible humor.

I looked at the bruises tattooing his forerms and started shaking. I told him it was my first time drawing blood.

"Of course it's your foist time," he yelled at me. "Every g**damned thoid year student's gotta loin on me."

(He'd been a patient in that teaching hospital often enough to know a third year from a fourth year student by degree of whiteness and crispness of their short lab coats.) 

As time goes on, the fear goes away and cockiness sets in. And sometimes you just are forced to skip the "see one" part and just "do one."

My first lumbar puncture, my first arterial blood gas, and my first Picc line were done after only reading about them, the latter with the manual being read aloud to me by my resident, while I did my first one in the wee hours of my internship.

Nowadays (to quote from all the doctors of all the generations before me), "Young doctors have it so much easier than I did."

I say this because, you see, I never had YouTube. 

YouTube is really an amazing learning tool. Even someone as dimwitted as I am can use YouTube to learn to fix my motorcycle or install a 20 amp, 220V circuit breaker. I am pretty sure that I could even learn how to do brain surgery. Armed with the self-assuredness I learned in my medical training, and YouTube, I feel like there's nothing I can't do. Until recently.

I now face before me a terrifying challenge, and I have no one to blame but myself. You see, I recently got this wild hair of an idea to scuba dive in the Caribbean. So, when I asked my wife to go scuba diving in Belize, she put up all the usual obstacles: No money. No time. Nothing to wear.

Inexplicably, something must have overcome me because all of a sudden I heard myself say, in a low, quiet voice, "Come away to Belize with me. Just the two of us. No kids. I promise it'll be romantic."

To my astonishment, she said, "Yes."

My problem, of course, is that I have no idea how to act romantically. Don't get me wrong, I adore my wife, but after 30 years of marriage, she knows all my tricks. Romance isn't one of them. A friend suggested I Google it, and all I got were some dirty web sites and a reprimand from the hospital IT department. The anxiety is building, of course, because we leave tomorrow. I guess I just gotta feel the fear and do it anyway.