Now that we’re getting down to the wire, I’m having the same butterflies I did last year at this time. The butterflies are riding a rollercoaster – first excitement at moving on then, and then fear at the prospect of having even more responsibility than I have now.

There’s also the vertigo-inducing exercise of turning around, as it were, and remembering how the second-year residents looked to me when I started last year. I revered them nearly as much as I revered the chiefs – and them I nearly worshipped (which is just as well, because the executive chief is the direct manifestation of the program’s control over your life). And then to turn back, and realize how lost I’m going to feel, and the interns are going to be looking at me with – hopefully not reverence, but a little respect. And looking ahead, the increasing certainty that the new chiefs don’t feel any  more confident with their role than I do with mine. . . We all perform for each other.

The unit has stopped whirling a little bit, and settled down to more straightforward feverpaced activity. I had my first patient go into a grand mal seizure in front of me – actually the first real seizure I ever witnessed, and she had to go and be in status epilepticus for nearly forever. The seniors were all off elsewhere, in traumas, so I was left rummaging through my memory of the neurology rotation in medical school, and telling the nurses, “Since this patient has been in status for the last 30 minutes, her neurons are seriously burning out now; and we’ve already tried multiple doses of three different medications, so at this point I don’t particularly care what medication that we have to get from the other end of the hospital that the neurosurgeons do in these circumstances, iv valium is the handiest thing we haven’t tried yet, go ahead and push it.” And it actually worked. After we stopped the seizures, then the neurologists, neurosurgeons, and seniors turned up, and of course all looked at me skeptically: “Who’s seizing? I don’t see the patient moving at all.” No, because she’s had high-dose ativan, dilantin, valium, and propofol, she better not be seizing. So I was reduced to imitating the seizure for them, and the EEG confirmed my diagnosis. But I can hardly feel pleased about handling it, because it makes this patient’s prognosis so bad, and the family doesn’t seem to understand yet how bad things are.

I’ve also spent too much time in the last week talking to doctors about their relatives in the unit. Something funny is up, there are so many doctors’ mother/grandfathers/aunts/cousins through here lately. It’s a tricky conversation. You have to show courtesy between professionals, and also deference, since they’re all attendings a long way into private practice, and you’re just an intern. On the other hand, mostly they’ve been in very non-surgical specialties (pediatrics, heme/onc, family medicine), so in all honesty, between their nonsurgical mindset, and how far they are from medical school and internship, I may be (and my attending definitely is) a little more familiar with the management of critically ill trauma patients than they are. I’m still trying to figure out the exact phrases to use for telling them something that they may or may not already know or remember. But they are certainly the most wonderful historians; they can tell you all the medical history, medications, allergies, and surgical history of the family member; it’s like having a walking medical record. And then there’s the concern that if I use a technical term incorrectly, they’ll walk away thinking, “What kind of incompetent residents do they have working here, they can’t even name the fractures correctly?” Mostly, though, it goes ok. Just as I would be in such circumstances, they’re very glad to get some definite information in medicalese – the guild language.

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