Death is a virtually unavoidable part of working in medicine. One of the things I've heard over and over again from physicians is dealing with the first handful of deaths during medical school clinical rotations or internship after graduation. There's the second-guessing: what else could I have done to save the person's life? The healthy response seems to be becoming at peace with the fact medicine can't fix everything, accepting that nothing more could have been done given the current state of the field, and that those patients got the best chance they could have had at more meaningful life.

One of the attractions of pediatrics is, surprisingly enough, that there's less death as kids tend to bounce back from the kinds of things that would kill adults.