The real education of a physician is in learning that, for most patients, the journey from health to serious illness and eventually death is filled with so much uncertainty and little goes as expected. However, that is not how medical school approaches the training of students. Tests are taken and answers are judged to be right and wrong. Your residency choices and eventual career are based on grades and board scores. My first lesson in the futility of needing to know with certainty, not surpisingly, did not take place in a class room but on a peat moss farm in Ballinasloe Ireland. The lesson learned on that foggy Irish night still reverberates today.