Pediatric Check-Up: Mom's Quote 1

Doctors, especially doctors in training, like to bemoan that "no one understands" just what we go through other than our allied medical professionals. Now I don't agree with that completely, but I do agree that a large percentage of people do not understand the training pathway or just what our training consists of. So here's a funny quote from my mom this week while I was visiting Reno (translated): "So now that you're out of school, you're less tired, right?"

Er, that didn't sound as funny, but please reference my previous blog post from this January:

Current total hours worked: 101.5!
Current days working on this part of the job: 7 days

Here's a picture of a fellow intern that same month. Can you tell that we were delirious?

Being Whole: Training And Development

Recently, one of the testier attending physicians in the department was speaking with another intern who appeared to be at least five years older than me. In reference to this intern's increased life experience points and presumably more focused and ambitious career plans, this attending linked them together and rather casually derided “the folks who go to medical school and don't know what they want and halfway through decide that they don't want all this [waving at the hospital].”

Now I resemble this remark because I do not intend to find a job as a usual pediatrician or go into subspecialist training when I finish. I intend to chart my way off the beaten path that leads from medical student to practicing physician. I love the work some days, and it's a valuable body of knowledge that I can master. Yet I am looking for work that will allow me to use many of the skill sets I have, and also to continue to be a generalist, learning new skills as I go. Incidentally, I will also be looking for work that is more conducive to family life and to pursuing my wide range of non-career interests. Therefore, I disagree with the implication that I've wasted the seven years I'll have put into the medical career at the end of my residency.

In the gaming world a player's character gathers experience points in each battle, whether the beast is slain or not. I can stretch a simile and suggest that each endeavor, each moment in life, garners myself experience. Though I do occasionally regret a choice, usually I get over the unnecessary emotion and view the moment as a learning experience. Similarly, while I could have chosen to take more of a risk and just moved to San Diego with Sunny to look for a job instead of going to medical school, and perhaps been happier finishing a Ph.D. program in English, I made the best decision I could at each step of my path between entering medical school and finishing my intern year in a pediatric residency. Thus, I am now endowed with one of the rarer professional degrees one'll see in academic research, and I also have a large body of knowledge on how children might be raised, though not the experience of course.

I have always pictured myself as a person who constantly evolves and develops herself. Though this stage in my growth may seem very masochistic to others, it still serves as a stage of dramatic growth. It is very narrow-minded to consider it a waste of time despite the fact that the outcome is not the expected one.

Pediatric Check-Up: Friends' Babies

I have very prolific and fertile relatives, and many of my aunts are young and still contemplating further babies. Also, my friends are starting to drop babies, though thankfully not many. The first pregnancy in my cousins has been announced, and in any pediatric setting, you'll find lots of colleagues with fetuses or babies. The fertility boom makes it an awkward time to be a pediatric resident interested in sleeping at night.

Now, I am fond of babies, especially that class of babies that I can return to their mothers when they start crying or pooping. Still, the climb in pregnancies is making me slightly alarmed. I have your typical close, big, extended family that gossips constantly amongst itself. One misinterpretation of my grudging advice by someone, and then everyone will leave me alone...which is an attractive thought.

Pediatric Check-Up: Hours

Current total hours worked: 101.5!
Current days working on this part of the job: 7 days

Pediatric Check-Up: Crazy Saturday

I get asked what my life is like fairly often, as I'm undergoing a type of training whose rigor is renowned. In J. Ruth Gendler's book, The Book of Qualities, I like how she describes how some people seek out suffering and are proud of having suffered. Some people avoid it. I sit somewhere in the continuum, but towards the avoidant side. I don't buy the idea that suffering automatically makes the sufferer noble. In my totally unresearched opinion, that's a religious tale they sold to some peasants to make them feel better about themselves. Yet, if an education or an experience is valuable enough to me, I'm willing to work to get it.

Currently, I'm an intern at the Pediatric Residency Training Program at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center, which is a lot of capitalized words. What it means is that I am in my first of three years of training to be a general pediatrician. The curriculum varies somewhat from program to program, though all programs must meet criteria to be accredited, so core facets remain similar across the country. Our year is divided into 13 four-week blocks called rotations. Each block we operate within a different part of the pediatric medical world, going from inpatient (hospital) service to outpatient to emergency to critical care to different types of specialty care.

This block I'm doing is called PARC: Pediatric Advocacy, Rural and Community. It's a relatively light block in terms of hours required. Scheduled activities are half-days at the most, with the rest of the time for self-study. The goal of the block is to educate pediatric residents in the process of advocating for our patients. This is a fluid target. "Our patients" could involve a specific patient, a family group, a certain ethnic or minority group in the area, or even creating change on a national level. "Advocating" can involve helping find resources to pay for a patient's chemotherapy, or making seat belt laws physiologically make sense for children, or writing a column, or teaching children how to safely approach a dog. Pediatricians as a group tend to be active advocates, though the issues and the populations we speak for may be very diverse. This month rests us (interns) from our labors, broadens our education, grounds us back in who we are, and gives us quality time with whatever we choose.

During this month, we also cross-cover (meaning serve where we are not working full time) the hospital urgent care clinic. Whomever covers the clinic also takes phone calls from worried mothers at night. Normally Saturdays are pretty light in clinic as we are only open from 9 AM to 2 PM, and I think that most patients don't know that we're open and don't want to go to the doctor on a weekend anyway. So what's a Saturday in the life of a resident like? Today, there was a rush of patients from opening to closing, and I was taking phone calls during clinic hours as well. I bought a coffee and biscuit for breakfast at 9 AM, ate the first bite while standing up at 11:30 AM, at the last bite while standing up at 3 PM, and left at 4:30 PM while starving for some linguine. The unpredictability of patient care is why I never commit to anything during work days when the time I leave is scheduled as "when the last patient is done". Not even food, my first and foremost romantic partner on some days, is exempt from this. I estimate that the last patient left around 5PM. I'm still taking phone calls. Crazy.