What does it feel like to squeeze a teenager's heart in your bloodied hands, focused, determined, willing it to beat and then watching the life slip away?
Surgeon Ton Konig did just that in a speeding ambulance, ripping open a chest while trying to save a 17-year-old stab victim. He failed - and that failure will live with him forever. He will never, ever be able to forget it.
What do we ask of our medics? A nurse on last night's Panorama told of the moment he almost walked out into the night during a hectic shift, physically and emotionally unable to take any more. These are human beings, pushed to the edge of endurance by what we ask of them.
Time to take control. Stop asking for miracles and start taking much better care of ourselves. Stop wasting their time with silly, trivial stuff that could be sorted with a paracetemol and a plaster.
Above all, put the knives down. leave all that cutting to the people who do it best - those brilliant, but badly-treated surgeons.
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