Starting Internship

[pruritis_ani]

Just want to pass on a good luck to all of my intern colleagues, getting ready for our upcoming first night of call (and to the few of us that have already started, yikes)!

I am starting on July 1, and pretty freaked out about the whole thing...it is what we have worked so hard to achieve over the years, and I am looking forward to it as well, but my god! I can't even get used to everyone calling me Dr. pruritis_ani yet! And they expect me to know something???

Anyhow, wanted to share a nice passage that I read many years ago. Enjoy and good luck!

“Tomorrow you are an intern. You will work both night and day. You will be tired, I know, and I don’t want any more of that kind of tired. An intern, like a poet, is at the disposal of his night. The more one drinks of the night, the more one thirsts for the light of day. This is as true for the doctor as it is for the insomniac. Still, there is something to be said for working at night in the hospital. The external glare of daytime is gone, and one is permeated by a wave of darkness. Now the ritual of healing is more naturally practiced. For so many years I have been patrolling these night corridors with the lamplight creeping just ahead from room to room, illuminating wounds that are faces, faces that are wounds. As though I were a sentry pacing out the border between home and a wild country. You must remember when you are tired and it is late at night, when the patients ask if you are a real doctor or an intern, that it is night when most people make love. It is night that dismantles the barricade to the heart.”

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[DOtobe]

Congratulations to all the new interns who are starting (or have started already)! And good luck!

 

[Obedeli]

Just want to pass on a good luck to all of my intern colleagues, getting ready for our upcoming first night of call (and to the few of us that have already started, yikes)!

I am starting on July 1, and pretty freaked out about the whole thing...it is what we have worked so hard to achieve over the years, and I am looking forward to it as well, but my god! I can't even get used to everyone calling me Dr. pruritis_ani yet! And they expect me to know something???

Anyhow, wanted to share a nice passage that I read many years ago. Enjoy and good luck!

Any person who quotes about the "barricade of the heart" or the "ritual of healing" hasn't gotten a page at 11 pm to request a consult be placed to psychiatry for depression on a floor patient or a page at 2:30AM that a "BUN (pronouced bun) is low... should we replace it." Seriously, this quote is obviously written many years out residency and/or by someone who takes themselves way too seriously. It reminds me off all that William Carlos Williams crap.

Seriously though, good luck. The first couple of days will suck horribly but it will get better and so will you.

 

[pruritis_ani]

Ahh, I forgot to give credit for the quote! Not William Carlos Williams, but close. Richard Selzer.

Of course it is a bit romanticized, but I figured that was at least as good a defense mechanism as denial....

 

[Blade28]

Tomorrow's my last day as a PGY1! Can't wait.