So, I will try to actually answer each of your questions as best I can. I am nearing the end of intern year and found it generally quite depressing. It does have its good moments though, and the job description in and of itself is better than being a medical student, I think.
why, specifically does it suck?
--The hours really are outrageous, and there is no rest for the weary. You may be q4 as a med student but there is some downtime generally where you can disappear and maybe get lunch or something
--People are mean to you. Nurses, attendings, sometimes patients/families and sometimes senior residents but more often it's the first two that can really make you miserable.
--People often move to an unfamiliar city for residency. This is generally an awful idea b/c it's nearly impossible to meet people and get a social life started while an intern. This probably depresses me more than my job itself.
--You still do a lot of scut work. Sure, you can write orders, but the downside of that is...that you can write orders. And nurses who don't work 30 hours straight call at 4 am when you've been there since 6 am the previous day to ask, "uhm, so I was flipping through the chart of this patient you're cross-covering, and wonder if you could clarify this order...?"
--It's often a thankless job. You get told that you look too young to be a doctor, patient would like to talk to someone more senior, etc. And it's insulting to write notes for attendings when you've been up for 28 hours straight...I managed this patient for you all night and got stuck at the bedside for 3 hours, write your own f*king note!
--You often don't know what you're doing, and people get mad at you for it. If I could change one thing about med school it would be to spend more time talking about G-tubes and PICC lines and Port-a-caths and all this bull$hit medical equipment that gorked-out wards patients (both adult and pediatric) have in abundance...and much less time talking about the Krebs cycle. You realize that a lot of what you learned in med school wasn't all that useful, and now people expect you to know things that you really never learned much about. I don't know the first f*cking thing about advancing or holding feeds in gorked CP kids who can't stop vomiting...but guess what I get paged about every 5 seconds on peds wards call?
when the compensation gets better (both salary and lifestyle) for your work, do you think that you will like it any more?
--I would like to think the answer is yes. You have more control over what it is that you actually do in terms of specialization. Even if you are a generalist, you can tailor your focus to a certain population. There is a general pediatrician here who focuses on primary care of kids with complex congenital heart disease or kids who've had heart transplants. Personally, i'd rather shoot myself in the face, but it goes to show how much you can really tailor your life and what you see. You can see what you really enjoy. Whereas on wards you have NO control whatsoever over who you admit or manage. Besides, I don't see too many attendings who seem to hate life. I do, however, see a LOT of interns who seem miserable. I have faith that things will get better, we all have to pay our dues.
do you regret going into medicine?
--No, but that may be because I don't know any better. I went straight through everything and started internship at 25. I worked before this but that's b/c I was a poor kid from Nevada so my other "work" jobs were waiting tables, working at petsmart, a brief stint as a catalog model when i used to be cute, etc. I don't know what it would actually be like to have another skilled "professional" job.
are you still interested in medicine? should your interest dictate your career choice?
--Well I think no one would go into medicine who wasn't at least somewhat interested by it. It's simply too much work if you don't find the material interesting, at least in theory. I liked the theory behind medicine so much that I almost went into Pathology, because I knew that the practice of it sucked quite a bit. However, I have found that the thing that makes it suck (at least for me) isn't the patients or families. It's the system and the higher-ups and the ancillary staff and the hospital policies that suck. I do like the patients and families, and I would imagine this would be an even crappier job for someone that didn't.
what were your motivations for going into medicine? was it primarily "helping people"
--There are a lot of ways to help people. You'd be pretty hard-pressed to argue that teachers, nurses, social workers, firefighters, etc don't "help people". I think if we're honest with ourselves there was a part about the feeling of prestige and importance that motivated many of us. Otherwise, why aren't we social workers instead of psychiatrists? Or teachers instead of pediatricians? Because we wanted to be important and powerful, that's why. And there isn't necessarily anything wrong with that, I think it's just something that's hard for many to admit. You'll never convince me that there aren't professions whose members "help people" at least as much if not more than physicians.
Well those are my answers, take em for what they're worth. I'm a half-bitter intern at the end of a very hard year. Best of luck with wherever you are in your search or in this very, very long process....
