&gt; this is a completely reasonable response. People have lives outside of work.<p>For someone in IT, perhaps, but the professional expectations in medicine are starkly different (although they are admittedly growing more lax, to the chagrin of the old guard).  In this particular case, the geriatric meningioma patient had already been cancelled on once, rescheduled with the promise of being the first procedure of the day, and then delayed to the end of the day because she tested positive for MRSA and they needed to do a decon of the OR after her procedure. You would seem to find it reasonable to reschedule her yet again, but neurosurgeons don&#x27;t have much room in their schedules to play scheduling games with, and in general, patients aren&#x27;t undergoing elective brain surgery for the fun of it: they need it now.<p>Perhaps the IT analogy is that neurosurgery is largely a hard real-time system: you must execute within a given time window or you fail.