In July of 1974 I was in my first month of internship at LA County-USC Medical Center. I was on the Jail Ward rotation: anyone in the LA County Jail who needed to see a doctor was brought to this ward in handcuffs by sheriff's deputies in a van, uncuffed upon leaving the elevator, and from then on treated like any other hospital patient, though there were deputies scattered throughout the ward, which held perhaps 50 prisoner-patients. Deputies were required to deposit their weapons in a safe before entering the ward.
In my third week or so on the ward — three weeks after graduating from medical school — we got a man who'd been in a fight whose arm had been sliced open by a broken bottle down to the bone, the injury being about a foot long. The thing was, he was so drunk, he wasn't in any pain yet was perfectly conscious.
Me and a fellow intern spent 3-4 hours in the early morning suturing him up after copiously irrigating the wound with many liters of sterile saline. We'd NEVER done anything remotely like this in med school, so we simply did what we'd learned from watching and reading. We must have put in hundred of sutures, starting with deep muscle and then moving outward layer by layer. We worked from opposite sides of the surgical field. During the entire procedure the guy never complained of pain, but rather talked with us perfectly rationally.
When we were done, we were certain he'd become septic and require weeks of IV antibiotics, but darned if that wasn't the case: he was discharged back to the County Jail after a couple days, with no apparent infection.