To the person who started this thread, and many others:
I would like to validate a lot of the feelings I've seen here.
To the poster, I'm not going to accuse you of being spoiled, or insult you.
The practice of medicine is enormously stressful for all involved, doctors and patients. It's hard for patients to suffer, and it's stressful to try to help people who are hurting. I always say medicine is the business of human suffering, and by business I mean that it's the name of the game. Dealing with suffering is what doctors and patients do, period. You are a professional deal-with-the-human-condition-which-by-its-very-nature-includes-unavoidable-suffering-in-the-form-of-pain-illness-aging-death-physical/mental limitations-abuse-addictions-sadness-or-the-expenditure-of-effort-in-minimizing-some-of-the-above-mentioned-things-er. There's a lot of good to be done getting your hands dirty getting in the trenches treating misery, so I don't mean to say that dealing with human misery is intrinsically miserable, but it is stressful by its very nature.
That being said, part of what adds to the misery (some of which is all in a day's work, and unavoidable, like a patient with pain from bony mets), is that medicine is a business. But that too is unavoidable according to the economists, as they say "there is no such thing as a free lunch," so there is a business aspect to medicine. Wants are unlimited, but resources aren't. Sucks.
In any case, just because there are "perfectly good and unavoidable reasons" for all the **** going down, I want to say:
It is frustrating to feel like you are trying to do your job and do the right thing and to feel like you are being faulted or shamed because some papers were late. Sure, maybe you could have "been more proactive" and "that's just the way it is" but I think it's understandably frustrating, and by the same token, while it may have been frustrating for the office to get the papers late, maybe that doesn't have to be expressed in a hurtful or rude way. It's frustrating when people are late, even when they have good reasons or it's unavoidable. It's frustrating for everyone when patients or the hospital doesn't have resources to decrease the frustration and suffering. I've been rude to nurses and they've been rude to me. The problems at a hospital seem to outmatch the solutions, and one of the resources are people, and people have ends to their ropes.
As far as coping with where you are, I don't have any good answers, all I can do is validate your feelings that if you and/or the other residents think it is a hostile, malignant place that could be doing a better job to be a more loving, gentler place of training future healers, than I think you are probably right. I might counter that people are likely doing the best they can, and this is true at the same time that it is true that they could be doing a better job.
There's a middle ground to this, which isn't telling you suck it up whimp it's all in your head, which is how I might paraphrase some of the responses I read here.
However, there are real-world and potentially very nasty consequences to leaving this residency without completing it. Now we're circling back to the business of medicine concept.
None of this is the way I think things should be, but my advice for coping:
1) Do everything you can to be as pleasing as you can to every single person around you, especially anyone that has any power over you
2) Never express any unhappiness, except maybe to validate an expression of unhappiness from a colleague, because no one ever likes their negative feelings being invalidated, so only violate rule number 2 so as not to violate rule number 1, ie no one likes to say to someone "wow that was so hard" only to have you say "it's not so bad" because while part of rule number 1) is to wear a smiley face at all times, don't do it to the point of pissing people off
3) Your job is to be "efficient" meaning do whatever it takes to make everyone else's job easier even if it almost kills you, as long as it doesn't kill a patient (because ultimately that doesn't make anyone's job easier, usually), and while we're talking about it being efficient is figuring out how to do the bare minimum in the shortest amount of time possible, understanding that the most good you can do is what you can do "efficiently" while still looking good. "Treat 'em and street 'em" and "a good note is a done note." Learn to cut the right corners. Learn to do all of these things while looking as good as possible. Here in rule number 3, understand that while I am being candid, looking good IS cutting the right corners but never admitting as much. Understand that "efficient" care as I've described it is "the best care," when it's really "the best care you can give given ridiculous circumstances." You are given spaghetti noodles to make the Emperor his new robe, and by God, he is not naked in it, and not only that, it looks good on him.
Now, many people will jump in and say that my 3 rules are bull****, that "I don't cut corners, I'm efficient, I'm just really good at doing everything perfectly and honestly and delivering excellent patient care and getting along with everyone while being respectfully assertive and handling conflicts constructively is key and blah blah blah" and saying all the right things about themselves while putting you down, but remember that denying the 3 rules and saying the right things is part of looking good. Putting you down is part of the denial, and putting others down and denial is sadly one of the most common coping mechanisms in medicine for everything I've described. It's common because it's effective at making people feel better about living by the 3 sad rules above.
Godspeed.
