A year in the life...

So apparently intern year is time consuming. I take back all of the bitching I did in medical school...it was miserable, but all I had to do was pass the next test and get into a residency. At least I wasn't responsible for people's lives. I look back on some of the things I wrote, and what an insecure, pampered and petty ass I was.

Needless to say, Intern year has been an interesting experience.

I've learned lots of new skills...like how to not sleep for 30 hours, how to sleep through anything, how to simultaneously increase the urine output of my patients while decreasing my own, where the cleanest bathrooms in the hospital are, how to avoid being paged in the ICU for 30 minutes when you're on call, how to keep people alive until 7:05 am (when the relief arrives). How to simultaneously frustrate every consultant in the entire hospital. How to play nice with people I don't like.

I've seen lots of interesting things...disease progressing right in front of me, people dying, the miracle of birth. A pediatric cardiac surgeon opening a premie's chest at the bedside to ligate a PDA. Priapism. Rectal foreign bodies. Almost every STD imaginable (not syphilis...yet). The stuff med blogs are built upon.

I've done a lot of cool things...put tubes into almost every oriface (even some that weren't there before hand), swung people back around from the brink of death and gently guided more than a few souls off this plane of existence when their struggles were over.

I have never been so alternately frustrated, overjoyed, satisfied, relieved and completely dejected in a single 24 hour period as I have since I've been a resident.

I'm growing on a daily basis as a person. I have a great collection of mentors in my attendings who know exactly how to crush my soul when I need it (like the time I forgot to order a pregnancy test) and to toss a little praise my way when I do an adequate job.

I have neither the writing skills nor the motivation to even try to summarize my day to day. It's impossible to narrate...and frankly makes for boring reading. So, like over the past several months, I'm putting the blog away until there are some good stories to tell or some medical mysteries to post. Right now, I've got nothing.