Changes

Sometimes I think New Year's Resolutions should instead be New Year's Changes for these are things I'd like to institute now than things to put off. One New Year's Change I'd like to make (at least from a medical side) is to rebalance my life. Intern year is always at risk for dominating everything I do and think about, and I have to stifle it from suffocating all the other facets of my life. William Butler Yeats said, "The intellect of man is forced to choose / perfection of the life, or of the work" ("The Choice"). This is incredibly true; to be a perfect intern is to give up everything else so that medicine subsumes us. There is no right or wrong here, but it's simply something I do not want for myself. Yet it is difficult. The frontier is vast and when we do not look, the shadows encroach upon our space like manifest destiny; I could read and read and read and know only a fraction of medicine; it is the beauty and the rapture of it that holds us enthralled. True - there are those topics to which we avert our eyes - things like genetic disorders of the newborn and renal tubular acidoses - but for the most part, all of us in medicine could find something that could tease us endlessly. But no! This is the New Year's change; I will set aside those problems and dilemmas and conundrums and fascinomas at some point each day so that I can actually enjoy a life separate and segregate from work. Though I say to myself each day I will learn something in medicine - and for the most part, this is true - I will also say to myself that each day I will do something completely unrelated, fun, necessary.

There are of course other things in medicine I resolve to change. For each patient I admit, I will learn something about them that is completely unrelated to their chief complaint - the length of their marriage or the name of their pet or where they grew up and got their accent. I used to do this as a medical student, and it has since faded. I will, from an efficiency standpoint, finish my H&Ps prior to the post-call morning, a commitment that is easy to say when sleep is abundant, but so far away when Somnus calls. And there are half a dozen other easy, sweeping, generic things to say - I will teach more, I will look at all EKGs, I will glance at CXRs and CTs, I will eat well on call, I will go out of my way for my cointerns. These are all things I would like to do, and I have 6 more months on medicine to make it happen.