Thursday, February 2, 2017

Resident Check In

Just checking in with everyone, wanted to let you all know I'm doing okay.   I'm just so exhausted.

A lot of my colleagues in my year are feeling symptoms of "burnout," or just feeling exhausted emotionally, physically, and psychologically.  I think it's acting synergistically with my own negative feelings.  At least some people appreciate my sense of humor in this exhausting, stressful, anxiety-inducing time.  Sort of makes me feel a little better.

Residency is so much more tiring than college and medical school.  Sometimes you'll be lucky if you don't work two weeks straight.  Taking a sick day because you actually are ill requires calling and e-mailing a lot of people at once and your absence is pretty disruptive to a service, especially if you work somewhere with a high patient census all the time.  And people might even be mad or upset with you or be disappointed in you.  It's a very strange system.

This blog has really been helping me maintain my mental health.  You can't really understand what residency is like until you do it, and it affects a lot of people differently.  

We don't work 40 hours a week.  There's no overtime.  There's no 5 day work weeks.  You might work 80+ hours a week for a year and there's no bonus, no special compensation except for maybe a $5 meal voucher when you're on 30+ hour call.  Even when it's shift change and there's an emergency, you do your duty and you stay the extra 1-2 hours to keep someone stable and save their life.

We stay late after starting our days at 430AM and spend inordinate amounts of time on the phone to make sure that patient gets seen by neurology in time, or beg to get our patient seen urgently because they have a new diagnosis of a serious problem and there's no room in the clinic for 3 months.

Everything about medicine is so tiring.  The administrative things, the legal aspects, how physically demanding it is to not eat, drink, or use the bathroom for hours at a time when you're already sleep deprived and being pulled in 27 directions at once.

I guess I'm in the process of getting stronger.  I just need some rest.


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