In the home stretch

Tuesday is officially my last night of call on the thoracic foregut service. This service is one of those classic malignant surgery services. I guess the best way to describe it is to imagine 6 Dr. Pevecs operating like crazy and ripping into you at every opportunity. It's only been 30 days and I'll never be the same again.

I had a nice weekend on call so I'm starting to detox slowly from this experience. Overall, I've got to say that I'm honestly a little disappointed in myself. I let the service turn me into a malignant doctor. All of the residents on the service become this way at some point or another. You don't really think about it until you start listening to yourself talk, or you see the reaction on people's faces...family members of patients.

You can't have sympathy for patients when you're completely engrossed in how miserable your own experience is. That leads to dehumanizing the patients on your service. They become "mustache girl," "retard boy," "mute guy," or "female genitals" for anyone that complains of pain. It seems like such a unreasonable thing, to have pain, especially after we ripped out their esophagus through their chest and cut open their stomachs and pulled it up to their throat. I have become unable to empathize with my patients. I love my intubed ICU patients because they can't talk to me, extra kudos if they're sedated. Vomit guy has metastatic gastric cancer and most of the lung guys have lung cancer. I've lost 4 in the last 2 weeks, took one off of life support this morning. Who knew viagra could be life saving?

I think for the most part, I've been able to grin and bear it. The nurses always ask me why I'm always so happy. hmm...do I seem that way? I'm not a good enough person to come out showing compassion to these folks. I'm tired of the cracked out lady with the bag of methadone under her bed. Sometimes I say half-jokingly, stick fentanyl patches to any exposed skin so that I can get some sleep. I need god, so I've been trying to keep going to church. I'm not a big enough person to get through this on my own without becoming an asshole.

My two best memories from this service

1) giving a patient xanax, then seeing him run down the hall naked 5 minutes later, then seeing cops in his room 5 minutes later when his scrawny roommate accuses him of sexually molesting him.

2) My co-interns and I were getting absolutely reamed in the lobby by an attending when a pretty lady happened to walk by. All of the interns stared at the lady and the attending stopped screaming once he realized none of us were listening to him. He then turned and stared at the lady, forgot what he was so mad about and decided to go home.

-bender is post-call and going to bed