The day is long but too short by a lifetime.
You work ceaselessly but only accomplish the minimum of daily tasks. Greater pursuits are shelved for later. Long-term projects never get started. Family time is the few minutes between dinner and bed. You anxiously wait for a change, hopeful that this will not persist longer.
Victories are small unimportances: setting a date for Lasik, an offhand compliment from a supervisor, an delicious dinner from your wife.
But, the end of the day leaves you feeling empty, tired and cold.
You tell yourself, tomorrow will be better, knowing it is a lie. Tomorrow will leave you just as exhausted and delinquent as today.
Still, you are gorgeous, talented and humble. That’s got to count for something.
***
Your interns are not doing well and you have yet to show adequate leadership. They come to rounds without the basic data expected of them–vitals, labs, telemetry. They seem to think being flustered and offering apologies is acceptable. You fight your inner demon down who wants to tell them when I was an intern I came in at 4 in the morning, hand wrote my notes by 8am and attended an hour conference before rounds started at 9am and you can’t even get your vitals and labs written down by 9am when all it takes is printing out the “physicians progress note template” in a batch for our team list? A whole 5 minutes of work? Seriously? You get three more hours of sleep EVERY DAY than I did and don’t even have to answer your pager at night. And then you have the audacity to ask me to help with your notes?!
You wish you had the cojones to tell them how badly you think they are doing, but somehow are afraid they’ll break down and cry on you, quit the residency and/or suicide. You can’t seem to find the right words to scare but encourage, to reprimand but give hope. You actually look forward to them not being around so that you can work quickly and accurately with a modicum of refinement and skill. You wrack your brain trying to remember if you were at all like this as an intern, but remember only the choking fear of failure driving you beyond reasonable expectations.
Worst of all, you feel like a failure for not being able to make them better. You have failed to inspire, failed to teach, failed to make them better.
You may have fixed their mistakes behind their back and kept the patient’s safe, but you have failed to train them.
The stench of failure is suffocating.
