Happy New Year

I’ve started to write a million blog posts but I haven’t quite been able to finish.  As much as I wanted to celebrate the holidays with y’all, I just couldn’t.   I feel in desperate need for free time lately.  The good thing--intern year is officially half over.  It’s pretty incredible to think about how much I’ve learned in the past six months and how much I’ve seen.  I have delivered over 50 babies and done 30 C-sections, and that’s just in the 3 months that I was on obstetrics.

The past couple months I’ve been off service on internal medicine.  I had to take my white coat out of the bag to start the rotation.  I’m learning a lot and the people are very nice, but I’m just homesick in a lot of ways.  I haven’t had enough time to see my family in quite some time, and I really miss OB.  I was just starting to feel happy and comfortable as an intern in obstetrics as I switched to something completely new and different; it felt like starting all over again.

I love being a doctor, but it’s really hard.  It’s not the hours or the daily grind of the work per se, it’s just that being a doctor is now synonymous with being me.  Work isn’t just work when it involves life and death.  It isn’t just your job when you catch an exhausted mother’s beautiful newborn in your hands.  It isn’t just a vocation when you declare a 32 year old dead from a horrible cancer on New Year’s Eve and tell his family that he isn’t there anymore as they look at you with their hopes shattered. 

People that aren’t in residency have said “you knew what you were getting into when you signed up for this.”  But how could I, or anybody in residency truly anticipate what would this would be like?  It’s an incredibly surreal experience.  The highs are unbelievably amazing and the lows are ship sinking.  Sure I knew I would work a lot, watch people die, and be far away from home.  The fact of the matter is that the amount of emotional, physical and intellectual energy expended as an intern cannot be quantified or described.

This post wasn’t meant to depress people or to have somebody send out a suicide watch.  I’ll be fine--in fact I’ll be great.  For my New Year’s resolution, I don’t want to change anything.  I can’t spend my whole life feeling bad about all the stuff I didn’t do.  I just want to keep the resolve to be myself even with constricted time and limited sleep--happy, loud and proud.  I dare you all to do the same.