The best word to describe internal medicine is intense. Everything about it: the hours, the learning curve, the expectations, the patients. Nothing has been super easy (except eating the free lunches we get Mon, Tues, Thurs, and Fri!)
Some of the hard things I've faced:
- Working hard from 7 am to noon…noon the NEXT day, with no sleep in between. 30 hours is rough!!
- Telling a man who only had 1 month of symptoms that he has metastatic pancreatic cancer and his prognosis is poor…like max 3 months to live. Sad. Hard. He asked "What do I do with my life now?" What do you tell a guy like that?!
- Falling asleep in front of my attending…oops!
- Trying to stay awake at 3 am when nothing is going on…but you can't sleep because your team hasn't capped (gotten our max number of patients for the night) yet.
- Remembering everything I'm supposed to! (or learning it for the first time!)
Some of the fun things:
- Watching the sun rise, set, and rise again all in 1 shift of work.
- Hanging out with my med students!
- Lunch!
- Learning a lot!!
I'm on call again tomorrow night. I'm not sure how 4 nights of sleep went by so quickly, but I have a new attending doctor, and I hope to get more sleep!
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