The hardest job, yet, is keeping this thread on topic. Maybe I ought to compare someone to Hitler so that we can invoke Godwin's Law and just shut it down.
My favorite post in this whole thread yet.
Different jobs are hard in different ways. If you're going to compare difficulties of jobs, you need to compare likes to likes.
The physically hardest job I've ever done is picking and sorting tomatoes in the summer in Florida. I came home every night smelling like a rotten tomato and trying to evade the cloud of fruit flies that dogged my every move. Picture that kid Pigpen from the Peanuts cartoon. For a very long time after that, I wouldn't even want to *look* at a tomato, let alone eat one.
😛 In med school, the physically hardest rotations were surgery and gyn. I have some back issues, so standing there in one position for hours was not the most pleasant experience for me.
I don't think I've ever had an outside job that I felt was overwhelmingly intellectually challenging (i.e., challenging to the point where I felt like I might not be able to handle it). Passing my grad school qualifying exam might be the closest thing that comes to it. My advisor thought I probably wouldn't pass because I was kind of just getting by in the advanced synthesis class. But I busted my butt studying for the qual, and ironically, I was the only student in my year who managed to pass the qual on my first try. In med school, I think most people would say that the most intellectually challenging thing is studying for Step 1. I guess I'd agree with that, although a lot of people find studying for shelf exams third year to be pretty challenging too.
Emotionally, the toughest job I had was working at a camp for the disabled. Actually, that was pretty physically tough too, since we had to help the campers with ADLs, and some of the sessions were for adults. I had one camper who was almost 300 pounds and had some pretty rough bedsores. It was disgusting, but I did my best not to let her see that I felt that way. Also, one of the other counselors was harrassing me, and I had to go to my supervisor. I don't know what the supervisor did, but that guy stayed the heck away from me for the rest of the summer after that. In med school, the most emotionally difficult thing has been having some patients whom I've grown close to die. Even though your relationships with hospitalized patients are short, they're very intense. The very hardest part is having discussions with patients and their families where we break bad news about their diagnosis or prognosis. When the families start crying, sometimes it makes me want to start crying too.
