One Year

It has been a year of internship, a year of pneumonia and urosepsis and failure to thrive and COPD exacerbations and chest pain and GI bleed and altered mental status. It has been a year of daily notes, midnight admissions, social work rounds, wrestling with the fax machine (I have more confidence putting a central line into a patient than reliably sending a fax), calling the operator, negotiating with consultants, falling asleep at noon conference. It has been a year of poor nutrition, worse exercise, absent sleep, distanced friends and family. It has been a year of building self-confidence, of perceived last-minute saves, of crying with patients and families, of obscure diagnoses, of late-night troubleshooting.

It is a year of small victories, a year where I finally learned my antibiotics, where I feel confident that I can keep a patient alive overnight until help comes in the morning, where I've learned how to put a needle into a person, where I've built a library of heuristics in my head so that I have a list of diagnoses within minutes of seeing someone. We are always told, "learn how to tell if someone is sick versus not sick," a feat that sounds easier than it is but something I think I've learned. It's been a year of growth.

It is the kind of year where in a week, I'll start saying, "Back in my day, I worked 30 hour shifts." It's the kind of year I'll never want to repeat again, but one where I'll look back and understand as one of those curiosities and perhaps necessities of residency.