Newbie...

So I've got a new job... you may have heard (link the graduation post). For those of you who don't know I started on pediatric surgery, and it's been a steep learning curve (especially, since my fourth year of medical school would never be described as "rigorous"). Every fifth day, I take call and cover the thoracic, urology, and trauma surgery services. That means that on call I cover anywhere from 50-65 patients (some of whom are in the ICU, and way too complicated for me... which means that if it's serious, I cover them by immediately calling someone else). It's definitely a far cry from a fourth year full of transfusion medicine, radiology, noon quitting times and a little bit of golf. The adjustment; however dramatic, has been a smooth one and I've never felt overwhelmed (there are too many people around waiting to take over for any feelings of inadequacy to set in). However, it is frustrating to be reminded on a daily basis that although you've spent years in school, you have very few practical skills. It's like getting punched in the face by Mike Tyson, only he's wearing pink boxing gloves with extra padding... so while there are plenty of benefits to pad the new job and make it look pretty... you're still getting punched in the face.

The pink gloves and padding...

• Every time, you page someone/return a page and the overhead intercom calls out Dr. P....
• When pharmacists call you on your day off to clarify prescriptions, that you wrote...
• When you walk into a room, and speak with parents and children of are sometimes rather sick and you get to see the look on their face when you can give them more information about their child's hospital course...
• Making a decision late at night, and finding out the next day that it was the decision the real doctors would have made...
• Getting paged by a nurse to do something, because hospital policy states that only a doctor can do it...
• Doing a procedure on the floor that someone else couldn't do, and successfully doing it...

Punches to the face...

• Answering the page, to learn that it's only your co-intern looking for someone to go to lunch with... and you can't go because you're busy.
• The clarification is only necessary because you prescribed a tylenol suppository for a 15 year old, instead of the oral medication like every other 15 year old in the world gets (it's only happened once)...
• The look on the faces of worried parents when, fifteen minutes after you've given the parents a long drawn out explanation, the attending comes in and completely contradicts everything you just said. Because he just got off the phone with another attending because they didn't want to talk through the intern...
• In the morning you learn that the correct decision you made over night, was neither important nor necessary (i.e. the nurse didn't see the order already in the chart)...
  Learning that hospital policies are silly and require stupid things like a doctor pushing down a plunger on a syringe... and of course you have to walk clear across the hospital at 3AM to do it...
• Doing the procedure and no one ever knowng, because the nurse never paged anyone else... so all your superior have to judge you are all the mistakes/"I need your helps"...
• Realizing that after all this, you've never loved your job more... So while someone who loves being punched in the face is clearly not a logical person, at least I'm a happy one...

Well off to bed... The hospital needs its punching bag...