Year After Year

When I reflect on how I've changed in the past twelve months, I realize I've grown quite a bit. All those call nights and stressful moments do add up. My biggest change is gaining confidence. I have a better sense of when I need help and when I can trust my clinical impressions. I have moved from being a medical student watching doctors handle stressful situations to being an intern guided by my mentors in those situations to now being a resident approaching them with more and more independence. It feels comfortable. Soon I will have to be an attending, the end of the line. More than acquiring medical facts, which we learn from medical school and lectures and books, residency is about developing judgement, acumen, experience, and instinct. I don't notice this from day to day, but at the end of the year, I can tell I'm getting these intangibles.