One more week and I’m done with residency!
I’ve learned so much, I’m more self assured, a better clinician, better rooted in my knowledge and my morals.
I feel broken.
After a few glasses of wine and the celebrations of graduation, I came home and the tears started flowing. It was overwhelming, the relief that this experience is over. Because there is a poorly defined seldom spoken collective trauma that we as residents go through.
It’s in the impossibly long hours, the massive amounts of clinical knowledge, the fear of making a mistake, in the scorn of colleagues and superiors when we do, and don’t forget about the global pandemic. We push through aday at a time. Counting down until the next vacation, the next day off, until the block ends, the shift is over. We cry in empty patient rooms, in supply closets, in showers, on our kitchen floors, in our cars- If we cry at all. Eventually you get good at seldom feeling, we push all tenderness aside, if we can.
As I finish these most grueling years, I feel splintered. There are other things too; the doll in lace, listening to the agonized cries of a mother losing a child, telling a four year old’s father that he has leukemia, watching a forgotten toddler suffer for weeks in agony that we can’t stifle with medications as the family struggles with code status, the young adults who suffer alone as visitors are forbidden in the height of the pandemic, doing a neurological exam on an infant in a trauma bay only to discover fixed and dilated pupils and learn later that he was shaken...
We all have dozens of stories like this. Most of them pushed aside, shuttered somewhere for later. Hidden.
There are good stories too- the thirty week preemie who went home as a healthy baby, the first words uttered after weeks of therapy following a TBI, bringing a pool into the PICU to grant a final wish, joking with a boy who got a fishhook stuck in his nose, the crayon drawn cards and pictures that decorate my workspace, games of candyland and monopoly in hospital rooms, summer camp for cancer kids, countless hugs from patients and a few from grateful parents as well.
I am so immensely grateful to my mentors, to the kind attendings, to the patients and the families for all that they have taught me. I’m hoping to become a better person and continue to refine by skills as a general pediatrician and pediatric hospitalist as this next phase of life begins. I also plan on being unashamedly selfish and spending time and effort on myself.
It’s going to take a lot healing before I’m well again.
