One more day of internship left. It’s a little hard to believe.

I’m making a couple of notes for myself about what I most admired in the junior residents I worked with over the last year, because I know that within a month, if not less, I’ll have completely forgotten what it was like to be an intern. (The same way that I’ve forgotten what it was like to be a medical student. For the med students out there wondering, “How can the residents treat us like this? Don’t they remember what it was like?” the answer is, no, we don’t remember, because things change so fast in just a few years. I remember third year of medical school about as much as I remember college, unless I concentrate. Even my own blog from back then seems foreign. I’m a different person now, immeasurably more cynical, skeptical, overbearing, determined, confident – hardened. For instance, when people ask for pain medicine, I have no problem saying flatly to the nurse, “That patient has been told that they will have no more iv pain medication. Tell them those are the rules that the attending discussed with them, and please try not to have to call me about it again.” The other day, as we were setting up the trauma bay for a gunshot victim, one of the residents told me, “You can put in the chest tube, but you have to really throw it in. No time for lidocaine, no dissection – cut and push. It doesn’t matter if the patient feels it. In fact, if he feels it, that’s good [because it would mean he was alive enough to care].” I told him, “It doesn’t matter to me what the patient thinks. You watch, I’ll throw it in.” And I did, because by this time I care a lot more about the technical affair of getting the tube in fast, and the overall implications of getting it in fast enough to prevent a tension pneumothorax or overwhelming hemothorax from killing the patient, than I do about whether it hurts him for a short time.)

Getting back to the stated topic: There were some residents I worked with for whom I would do absolutely anything, from something I simply could barely get up the willpower to do, like calling family members with bad news, to pure scut errands, like running to the other end of the hospital to get a paper they should have remembered to bring with them in the first place. Other residents (the minority) could make me silently furious simply by reminding me to do a job which was clearly my responsibility, and which I had been planning to do.

I think the biggest difference between these two groups was that the first kind of resident acted as though we were on a team, together; working toward the same goal, taking care of the same patients; they knew as much or more than I did about our patients, and didn’t have to have the whole story told to them fresh when I came to ask question. They routinely helped get all the work done, no matter whether it was “intern-level” or not; and if they didn’t help, I knew it was because they were overwhelmed with their own work. They cared about whether I got to sit down or eat, what time I came in and left. (Speaking of which, all year, all the seniors seemed to work at getting the interns home at a very decent time, no matter what that meant for themselves. I think now that I’m ready to commit to the longer hours the seniors worked; I need to remember to think about the interns’ hours.) Since I knew they cared about me and my patients, I would do pretty much anything for them, and still will, as we both advance in seniority. The second kind of resident clearly regarded me as a working machine, who existed to save them from having to do any work, and preferably from having to know much about my patients. That is purely bad leadership, and bad medicine.

So my primary resolution is, not to enjoy having an intern to do the scut work so much that I stop caring about the intern’s patients, or stop sharing in the general work of the team. (Although after these last two weeks, desperately short-staffed, without even medical students to help out, having someone junior to me, to do work, when I haven’t even had a senior to help out, will be an unbelievable luxury. I’m not sure what I’ll do with it.)

The other thing that I know I loved about seniors was when they let me do procedures, or enabled me to scrub in on cases. That may be a little more challenging, since I know I’ll be grasping to do every case that comes my way, now that I’m finally allowed/expected to do more, and as for procedures, I’ll still be gaining confidence at doing them on my own – let alone supervising someone else. Many juniors, who seem to have ice in their veins, taught me how to place lines in coding patients, by standing back and forcing me to try myself, before they would take over. I don’t know if I can be that cool.

Advertisement