summertime...
I took trauma call last night. I gotta say, I realized I was much less of a man and even less so a doctor last night. Most of the night was great. I was hanging out with an ENT resident. It turned out that we took summer school together at Irvine, and we chatted about march madness and looked at youtube clips, like the one of Reggie Evans grabbing Christ Kaman's boys. Things turned a little ugly around 5 am. We had a guy flown in from Winters. He was found down after being shot in the face through his eye. His GCS was 3 when he hit the ER. CT scan showed that there was bullet lodged in his right cerebrum. I joked around a little in the beginning, then kind of lost it. I basically said, fuck this, I'm going home. I don't know if I was supposed to stick around to round with the trauma team.
Maybe I'm not built for this. I like seeing healthy patients that get well. For the most part, people live with prostate cancer and kidney cancer patients usually get the tumor removed and go on with their lives. I'm not good at dealing with death and dying issues. It's incredibly important, but I tend to dance around the issue in my patients who are dying. Either that, or I'm a straight shooter. I provide emotional support when I can, but in general I find that I'm not fantastic with it. I think that may make me less of a doctor, ot at the very least, less of a man.
Done with 3 weeks of surgery. Like everyone else, I'm a little tired.
Surgery is a funny thing. It's efficient. You see a lot of patients in a short amount of time. You ask fewer questions and you try to be as personable as you can in that short period of time. As a med student, you have the luxury of slowing down for the patients who need you to hold their hand and rushing through those patients that look healthy and ready to go home. One does not always have that luxury. As a surgeon, I have to learn to be comfortable with causing my patients pain, in order to make them better. We joke about the motto, "heal with steel." But really, whether it's taking out staples after a surgery to resecting a huge tumor, I'm gonna cause the patient pain and I need to be ok with it. There are gonna be times when I'm consulted and I don't have the luxury to hold their hand because I need to place catheters in 10 more patients. I need to learn to be ok with it, but cognizant of the fact that there are many issues that need to be addressed, although at that time I can only deal with their wound healing. I feel that for a lot of surgery residents, they forget about the patient and remember their patients as the guy who needs his stitches removed or the guy who needs to have his diet changed. It's important not to lose that awareness. I guess the question is, in the long run, does it make a difference? In the short term, our behaviors are gonna be the same...do our thing and run off to see the next patient. I just need to be reminded that I'm still human. For the greater part of the day, I'm really sleepy and hungry all the time. It's finally gotten to the point where I can acknowledge that I'm hungry and tired, but focus on patient care rather than my own needs. Next step is residency. I hope to god that we all end up at the places and programs that will ultimately make us happy and the best docs that we can be. I guess I'm not going to be a physician...I'll be a surgeon. It feels weird having that in the open now.
-bender
Dude, trauma call is hard, especially at first. But after 4 weeks of trauma, I got pretty immune to it, which was a bit scary. But you've got to detach or you won't be able to cope. I'm with you, still in that groove of not wanting to hurt anyone by providing care for them. I guess that comes with time too. Congrats on deciding to be a surgeon. I think you'll be great and it is a great field. Hell, if I liked the OR better I would join you. It sure beats rounding all day.
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