R1 December, Or: Embracing The Suck

Hey all.

I am sorry I have not written in a long time.

I have, actually; you just haven't seen most of it.  I have several posts sitting in my virtual drafts pile in various stages of completion; I just have barely had the willpower to finish all of my real work, let alone come and write something I am happy with.

I wanted to take a smidge of time and say this, though: it's getting better.  This is for two reasons.  One is that I am getting better at my job.  A great deal of my daily angst comes from the fact that I have to learn on people who really deserve a fully trained doctor treating them, because everyone deserves that.  I feel like I'm cheating people somehow and I hate that I'm not good at my job yet.  But after almost six months of working at this every day (literally every single day, in one form or another), I can tell I'm improving.  There's no substitute for immersion when it comes to rapid and sustained learning, and residency is nothing if not immersion in medicine.  There are days I come home feeling like my brain is an overstuffed pillow because I go through so much new stuff - everything from how to fill out an obscure bit of paperwork correctly to reading up on a complex disease interaction I wasn't aware of.

Reason two is that I have adjusted.  By "adjusted" I pretty much just mean toughened up.  At first there was a lot of shock and resentment at how much work this is, not just in terms of hours but also in terms of how mentally and emotionally exhausting it is.  Responsibility = stress!  It was also really physically hard to make my body get up at 4am and work for hours and hours.  And I'll just come out and say it: I missed emergency medicine with a quiet but deep bitterness that made everything just that much harder to get through.  Today, though, I realised I was starting to legitimately embrace the suck.  I work all the time, I have crappy (read: no) work-life boundaries, I don't get to see family for the holidays this year, and I feel constantly like I'm coming down with some bug.  And all of that is okay.  It's residency.  It sucks.  Somehow that's not an inherently bad thing anymore.  And I'm not angry about having to let go of emergency medicine anymore, which is a huge weight off my back.

I don't know where things will go from here.  But I will say that change has been happening while I wasn't even paying attention, and it's good.  This is me trusting the process God put me into.