God Bless the Surgical Interns

Two weeks into a four week medicine sub-internship. This is my last major hurdle towards graduation, and I’m excited about that, so I won’t waste a lot of time here on why the site of this rotation is not so hot for students, or why I would never choose to be a resident at this hospital.

Suffice it to say that too many of the parties involved have chosen misery as a lifestyle, and since in my view that IS a choice, I hold them responsible for their own despair and refuse to buy into it. Probably on some given day of my own residency I will myself be a miserable cur, but if I’m like this all the time, or I’m treating other people, i.e. med students, like crap, please just hunt me down and shoot me.

One bright spot that keeps me from focusing on this is the rapid approach of Match Day, less than two weeks away at this point. Sometime on March 15th I will receive an email alerting me to the location of my own indentured servitude. As I alluded to above, I’m going to try really hard to make residency a positive experience. I know it is possible because I’ve seen it done at other hospitals, and I’ve tried hard to assemble a rank list full of those places.

Another bright spot: the fact that although I am on a medicine service, for some reason almost all our interns will be going on to surgical programs. So, although they are under the dictum of the Medicine chiefs, they have amassed, through birth, exposure, or Gray’s Anatomy, enough Surgical Attitude to not take much shit when they have a say about it.

Case in point: the intern I was assigned to stand call with today. I showed up at seven with enough food and changes of scrubs for a hectic twenty-four hours. She had me round, write notes and orders, and then cut me loose. In her words, after a sixty hour week on a medicine service, I wasn’t going to absorb a whole lot following her around to check labs on a Saturday. (Also, although she was too polite to say it, I would probably have slowed her down in the process.)

How refreshing is that—the ability to call bullshit where it exists and send somebody home for a nice weekend?