| | if i remember correctly, i was never all that happy during my clerkship months in third year med school. it sucked to get up so early in the morning, feel like i was wasting time when i was actually there, and then to be too tired durign the day to get in any significant studying done for the shelf exam. i'd say that, on a scale of 1-10, with 1 being lowest and 10 being highest on the happiness scale, my mood vital signs ranged between 3 and 7 (because there were good days), but averaging at 4.
on my sub-i, it was a 5.5 average, just because i was that much more useful.
but on this elective month at the micu, i'm teetering towards a 2, maybe even a 1.5. getting out of bed is so hard. waking up is not the problem - i just lay there, in the fetal position, curled under my comforter, trying to devise some scheme to make the alarm clock not go off. but then when it does i jump out of bed so that it doesn't wake my roommates. and once my feet hit the floor, it's all over. the day hath beguneth.
there's just something so severely demoralizing about working up these new patients with their laundry list of diseases and critical conditions, knowing that their chances of leaving that icu room are slim to none. and then when one patient passes away, within an couple of hours that bed is occupied by another critically ill patient.
and then there's the patient who looks like she's with it because she has these weird eye movements, saccade-like but still lacking the basic doll's eye reflex, but how can she be when she's lost so much blood flow to her brain for so long? even the color of her skin looks like that of a corpse. so the group of white coats that shuffle around the hospital then ask the grieving sisters about the option of "withdrawal of care," so that the patient can "expire." 56 days on the ventilator and counting...
i don't know which is worse.
will it be easier when i'm an intern or resident, just because at least i have that much more control and an more in the 'in' with the patient's care? there is an element that is left to my own imagination, secondary to my own times of empty-handedness. or perhaps it'll suck that much more in a few months (some of the interns on the team have had steadily declining moods. could be the q3 call schedule, too.), only to get better when the heart hardens over and each patient is broken down into a series of seven systems, nothing more, nothing less.
i don't want the latter to happen, though. 'tis step 1 to becoming that jackass attending i vowed i'd never become.
k. gotta go into work now. late enough as it is.
btw: get a living will, people. NOW. |
| | Posted 2/19/2008 5:02 AM - 88 Views - 4 eProps - 2 comments
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