the nightmare parts of intern year

I'm not a public complainer.  I spend a lot of my days in the resident workroom typing notes and listening to my colleagues complain about their schedule or a certain service in the hospital day in, day out.

But I wanted to give people a glimpse into the bad parts of intern year and residency.  I nearly reached a breaking point a few months ago on an unspecified rotation.

The day started well.  I was dealing with the better part of a year of being an off-service rotator, farmed out to do all the work everyone thinks they're too good to do, with the best attitude I can put together.

The unit was weird.  Many people didn't understand how it worked.  There was no communication between services unless I called them.  I often had to call 3 times until someone answered or passed me onto someone else.

People started getting mad at me that I hadn't heard from Service X even though I was working like a dog to get a hold of them while getting pulled in 6 different directions.

I got about 15 calls about 2 patients alone in the span of 2 hours from confused nurses about what the plan for the patients were when I told them to talk to the primary service about them, I was just a consultant not in charge of primary-specific orders.  I started getting flak about how this patient wasn't getting discharged..WHEN I'M NOT THE ONE RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR DISCHARGE ORDERS!  

I started to get closer and closer to exploding in a shower of splinters.   I kept getting paged about how this order isn't right and its not perfect WHEN PRIMARY SERVICE IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THOSE ORDERS!  They were either too dumb or too lazy to read the top of the EMR and figure out who the primary team was.

Then we got a really sick patient everyone was overreacting about.  I say "overreacting" because I've seen sicker patients and I don't overcall things and I don't overtreat.  I've covered the MICU and CCU by myself at night and these patients people are losing their minds about are rock stable compared to what I've seen in the MICU.

My team consisted of people who had to make it known they were "smarter" and "better" than you just because they were your seniors.  They overcalled things, they overtreated, they got into arguments with specialists about what should be done and they had to make me be the messenger while they didn't lift a finger.

I had to apologize to the specialists about my seniors' behavior and pushy nature.  I was doing damage control on the bridges between us and other services.  It was exhausting having to do that and manage patients.

I can't wait until I move onto better things and do what I actually want to do.  I'm still exhausted.  I just gotta keep moving.

good luck to the future interns