Disliking my intern year

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Dr.Acula99

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Just want to see if this is abnormal or not. I'm doing prelim medicine year, and to be honest, I really dislike almost all of what I've done for the past two months. Is this normal? The majority of the cases are so uninteresting. Everything is defensive medicine, and I hate doing things I don't agree with or think are necessary. I haven't gotten to do any procedures. I know I don't want to do internal medicine, but I'm just concerned that I'm starting to hate all of medicine? Anyone else really hate their intern year?
 
I'm hating mine as well. All the social stuff, trying to arrange a homeless shelter or nursing home for patients and then all the unnecessary tests . Can't wait for next year when I start anesthesia.
 
Dr.Acula99 said:
Just want to see if this is abnormal or not. I'm doing prelim medicine year, and to be honest, I really dislike almost all of what I've done for the past two months. Is this normal? The majority of the cases are so uninteresting. Everything is defensive medicine, and I hate doing things I don't agree with or think are necessary. I haven't gotten to do any procedures. I know I don't want to do internal medicine, but I'm just concerned that I'm starting to hate all of medicine? Anyone else really hate their intern year?
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Just imagine how many CRNAs hated wiping asses and emptying bed pans before going to anesthesia school. The internship year is part of the requirements for Anesthesiology; so, why you may not like it very much try to tolerate it as much as possible. There is so much to learn in Medicine and the preliminary year is just the start of that lifelong learning process. FYI, there may even be certain anesthesia rotations you dislike as well but that too must be endured to obtain your goal.
 
If you were an internal medicine resident I'd say you were in trouble. You're not, so don't worry. Intern year sucks, that's why it's not called Interesting Year. If you've picked the right field you will love anesthesia when you get there, but you have to get there. Keep your chin up and go home every day glad you didn't choose IM. You'll be fine and it'll go fast. I haven't had to find a SNF, LTAC or nursing home for someone since the day I finished intern year, and I don't miss it at all.
 
You don't hate all of medicine, just internal medicine. Calling consults you disagree with, working up something fruitless and expensive, rounding on ungrateful patients, social issues, endless discharge summaries, dealing with the ED, unnecessarily long rounding, constant pages, always being a new face... it will be a thing of the past before you know it. Anesthesia is a sweet gig compared to other garbage out there.
 
JOHNBROCHILL said:
You don't hate all of medicine, just internal medicine. Calling consults you disagree with, working up something fruitless and expensive, rounding on ungrateful patients, social issues, endless discharge summaries, dealing with the ED, unnecessarily long rounding, constant pages, always being a new face... it will be a thing of the past before you know it. Anesthesia is a sweet gig compared to other garbage out there.
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Are you me?
 
For a second i thought I stumbled into tree internal medicine boards. Intern year is what it is... take what you can from it but don't think it will be what you do on a daily basis in anesthesia.
 
I'm thanking my lucky stars every day that I'm in a TY program. Just got off a sweet ICU month and now heading into a transfusion medicine elective. I started off the year on medicine wards though, so that sucked for a short while.
 
Dr.Acula99 said:
Just want to see if this is abnormal or not. I'm doing prelim medicine year, and to be honest, I really dislike almost all of what I've done for the past two months. Is this normal? The majority of the cases are so uninteresting. Everything is defensive medicine, and I hate doing things I don't agree with or think are necessary. I haven't gotten to do any procedures. I know I don't want to do internal medicine, but I'm just concerned that I'm starting to hate all of medicine? Anyone else really hate their intern year?
Click to expand...

I'm right there with you, man. Had the same exact thoughts. I REAALLLY hope I like Anesthesia because this **** is terrible.
 
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Dr.Acula99 said:
Anyone else really hate their intern year?
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I did.

I have a photo of me holding my final progress note (on paper) as an intern. I still remember the unspeakably, indescribably vast joy. My smile was a mile wide.

Admissions for caregiver breakdown, the classic demented "panoody" (PNA-UTI), or "Granny's just not acting like herself" (i.e. vascular dementia progressed...all horrible. Being at the bottom of a horrible, horrible totem pole...horrible.

Learn the medicine knowledge and their mode of decision making. Try to teach them to reevaluate patients more often than q24h, and remind them to order T+C and echos for people who syncopize, and move on.
 
To be fair, a lot of people in IM hate IM. But they put up with it in the hopes they can subspecialize. Yeah, 3 years is a long time, but if it gets you to a subspecialty you like (e.g., cardiology, pulm/critical care), then that's for the rest of your life.
 
I hated whole my residency (resigned 3 times and turned back). Things get better in residency, after intern year; in life, after residency. Do not mind and question what you do there. Just do what your superiors say and forget everything then. Finish residency, start to take cases and earn money. Try to find some time and place to hang out.

I remind several unnecessary issues lead to childish conflicts which means nothing in real life. Just to feed some obsessive and complexed person's egoism or fulfill a lame hospital checklist. Just build your knowledge and skills and finish the residency timeline.

Take care 😉
 
Intern year sucks, no doubt about it, but speaking from the viewpoint of someone who just took the advanced and is studying for orals, the more you know about the pathophys, diagnosis, and management of your pts' medical problems, the easier your life becomes.
 
I remember having the same thoughts as an intern. You'll be fine, plus it's a new rotation in just a few weeks maybe it'll be better! Feel lucky you don't have to embrace the suck for 3 (or more!) full years.
 
You're not supposed to like internship. Most of it was a disoriented haze for me. Every time I got things figured out, it was on to the next rotation. You are the perpetual newbie and essentially powerless. Thankfully it's only a year. Just try to get along with people and make the best of it. Don't worry about procedures and just try to learn medicine.

Life gets MUCH better.
 
sometimes you have to do what you don't want to do today so you can do what you wanna do tomorrow

intern year will make you appreciate anesthesia if you have a true interest in the field
 
Been there brother

http://forums.studentdoctor.net/threads/not-seeing-the-light.641216/#post-8351254

Cant believe it has been 7 years since that post

Dr.Acula99 said:
Just want to see if this is abnormal or not. I'm doing prelim medicine year, and to be honest, I really dislike almost all of what I've done for the past two months. Is this normal? The majority of the cases are so uninteresting. Everything is defensive medicine, and I hate doing things I don't agree with or think are necessary. I haven't gotten to do any procedures. I know I don't want to do internal medicine, but I'm just concerned that I'm starting to hate all of medicine? Anyone else really hate their intern year?
Click to expand...
 
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Dr.Acula99 said:
Just want to see if this is abnormal or not. I'm doing prelim medicine year, and to be honest, I really dislike almost all of what I've done for the past two months. Is this normal? The majority of the cases are so uninteresting. Everything is defensive medicine, and I hate doing things I don't agree with or think are necessary. I haven't gotten to do any procedures. I know I don't want to do internal medicine, but I'm just concerned that I'm starting to hate all of medicine? Anyone else really hate their intern year?
Click to expand...

Intern year is unbearable at times. I recommend you try to have a social life so you can relax and unwind in a healthy way, find a mentor who you connect with and you can confide in, and also prioritize building a solid knowledge base - because all that medicine stuff comes back in the anesthesia ITEs and (from what I hear) the board exams. It also comes back a bit in the basic exam you take after ca-1 year (but that exam is now a blur for me)
 
No one is meant to truly enjoy intern year. It is meant to transition you from the honestly "cush" life of a 4th year medical student and teach you how to work up, evaluate, and treat a patient. More than that, you should be able to learn how to manage significant cardiovascular and pulmonary disease so that when faced with cases filled with bad medical disease, you don't balk and beg for consultants.

Learn to manage heart failure and recognize when a patient is and isn't optimized. A patient like I had today with Grade 3 diastolic failure with recent admission after GI bleed causing ADHF, 100 pack year smoking history, SSS, poor functional status, AFib who presented for her sternal wound debridement and flap after nonunion from CABG 2 years prior. There's lots in that case to look for. To make sure the patient can undergo surgery. Was she optimized? Yes. Baseline home oxygen, on lasix, no signs of volume overload, hemodynamics stable etc, pulm at baseline. I took her and she did well.

Understand medical disease and how to manage it. That is the BEST thing you can obtain from intern year.


Sent from my iPhone using SDN mobile
 
G-Man82 said:
No one is meant to truly enjoy intern year. It is meant to transition you from the honestly "cush" life of a 4th year medical student and teach you how to work up, evaluate, and treat a patient. More than that, you should be able to learn how to manage significant cardiovascular and pulmonary disease so that when faced with cases filled with bad medical disease, you don't balk and beg for consultants.

Learn to manage heart failure and recognize when a patient is and isn't optimized. A patient like I had today with Grade 3 diastolic failure with recent admission after GI bleed causing ADHF, 100 pack year smoking history, SSS, poor functional status, AFib who presented for her sternal wound debridement and flap after nonunion from CABG 2 years prior. There's lots in that case to look for. To make sure the patient can undergo surgery. Was she optimized? Yes. Baseline home oxygen, on lasix, no signs of volume overload, hemodynamics stable etc, pulm at baseline. I took her and she did well.

Understand medical disease and how to manage it. That is the BEST thing you can obtain from intern year.


Sent from my iPhone using SDN mobile
Click to expand...


Like G-man said, during intern year train to be the quarterback not the punter...
 
I would trade you my prelim surgery year for your prelim medicine year in a second. Believe me, it could be worse.
 
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Logano2230 said:
I probably average 90-100 hrs a week, 12 months of surgery this year, with no ICU experience and the secretary work I do is minimally relevant to anesthesia.
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Why does so much of intern year need to be non educational? The better part of our fest year is just wasted.
 
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Dr.Acula99 said:
Just want to see if this is abnormal or not. I'm doing prelim medicine year, and to be honest, I really dislike almost all of what I've done for the past two months. Is this normal? The majority of the cases are so uninteresting. Everything is defensive medicine, and I hate doing things I don't agree with or think are necessary. I haven't gotten to do any procedures. I know I don't want to do internal medicine, but I'm just concerned that I'm starting to hate all of medicine? Anyone else really hate their intern year?
Click to expand...

This is absolutely normal. Hang in there. Things will greatly improve next year, and I bet you'll absolutely love anesthesiology. This was my story. Less than 100 days of residency remaining for me...I still really dig this gig.
 
I'm pretty sure most people have had similar intern experiences to varying degrees, but what I don't understand is why any doctor should have to go through something like that. It literally serves no purpose to spend a year doing social work and mid level provider scut work when you are supposed to be receiving training on how to be a doctor. I feel that you kill yourself in the intern year working like an animal with no benefit whatsoever. In the world of medicine where you have mid level providers streamlined into every field it's hard to argue that doing monkey scutwork and social work for a year gives you an advantage over them as far as "clinical and educational training" is concerned. They could've literally hired someone off the street to do my intern year and it would've made no difference. "Put these orders in that I decided, call _____ , discharge this person, make sure he gets his home health set up with his wheelchair and a nurse at home, call and get the outside hospital records, please make sure he gets wheeled down to CT soon, call Nuclear medicine and find out if he needs to be NPO, call the lab to see if the pathology report is back yet, ..." need I go on?
 
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FollowTheMoney said:
I'm pretty sure most people have had similar intern experiences to varying degrees, but what I don't understand is why any doctor should have to go through something like that. It literally serves no purpose to spend a year doing social work and mid level provider scut work when you are supposed to be receiving training on how to be a doctor. I feel that you kill yourself in the intern year working like an animal with no benefit whatsoever. In the world of medicine where you have mid level providers streamlined into every field it's hard to argue that doing monkey scutwork and social work for a year gives you an advantage over them as far as "clinical and educational training" is concerned. They could've literally hired someone off the street to do my intern year and it would've made no difference. "Put these orders in that I decided, call _____ , discharge this person, make sure he gets his home health set up with his wheelchair and a nurse at home, call and get the outside hospital records, please make sure he gets wheeled down to CT soon, call Nuclear medicine and find out if he needs to be NPO, call the lab to see if the pathology report is back yet, ..." need I go on?
Click to expand...

Mine was very educational. There was scut, sure, but I learned a lot of internal medicine.
 
Intern year varies by the institution, but also from attending to attending and intern to intern. I saw other interns who were labelled (correctly or otherwise) as lazy or checked out and people definitely didn't trust them to do anything more than write the notes, put in the orders, etc. They have been dealing with interns much longer than you have been an intern and when you seem more interested in texting/Facebook, they probably aren't going to exert much effort towards your education.

No question, it's not a glamorous year, but there is a range of possible experiences and some of that is under your control. Like everyone else who did it, I am glad I never have to do it again, but there are still some solid take-away educational experiences that I had during that year that I still reflect on when managing patients in the OR.
 
rakotomazoto said:
Intern year varies by the institution, but also from attending to attending and intern to intern. I saw other interns who were labelled (correctly or otherwise) as lazy or checked out and people definitely didn't trust them to do anything more than write the notes, put in the orders, etc. They have been dealing with interns much longer than you have been an intern and when you seem more interested in texting/Facebook, they probably aren't going to exert much effort towards your education.

No question, it's not a glamorous year, but there is a range of possible experiences and some of that is under your control. Like everyone else who did it, I am glad I never have to do it again, but there are still some solid take-away educational experiences that I had during that year that I still reflect on when managing patients in the OR.
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Do a surgical rotation at an underserved understaffed massive health system and then get back to me.
 
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