Agraphia Medical Tragicomedy

Apathy

Well, it's struck again, the dreaded apathy.

It's interesting, as I look back through my med school career. At first I remember being totally excited to learn, to understand, to really study our coursework. Anatomy, neurology, physiology... that was the stuff I loved in college, and being able to study it and apply it to other people? What an honor, what a privilege!

The grind slowly caught up with me. I studied too much, took the "work hard, play hard" mantra too much to heart. I would sit on the couch with a beer, a sleeping pill, the TV blaring, and my computer fired up simultaneously just to relax. I started making jokes that I used coffee as an upper in the morning and beer as a downer at night... but I wasn't joking.

I finished Boards - god knows how - and thought to myself finally the long hours, the stress, the constant feeling that I should be doing something productive would stop.

3rd year rolls around and you realize that for all the studying you may have done during years 1 and 2, you still don't know shit. Attendings pimp you on arcane knowledge from their specialty they've been practicing for 40 years and are shocked when you don't know it. End-of-rotation exams are brutally hard and require you to diagnose, treat, and manage 100 patients in about 120 minutes.

On top of it all is the knowledge that everyone you work with... interns, residents, attendings... are all going to grade you subjectively on how well they thought you did. So you put on your smiley face, pretend like ophthalmology is the most awesome field EVER and go to work every morning, starting on average at 6AM and finishing around 5PM.

It is brutal, and exhausting, and sometimes honestly I wonder if it wasn't a huge mistake to go to medical school. I'm not asking for sympathy here, by the way, but instead hoping that some of you nod to yourselves while reading this and go "yeah, I know where he's coming from. I've thought the same thing to myself from time to time".

Listen, sometimes you get that patient who comes along and just makes it all worthwhile. But sometimes you punish your body, mind, and soul for some asshole who treats you like crap and expects you to FIX EVERYTHING WRONG WITH ME even though he's not fixable.

I'm a person too, folks. I like sleep, and food, and friends, and family. I've lost a lot of that these past 3 years... and sometimes the field of medicine just isn't rewarding enough to make the sacrifice worthwhile.

I suppose the reason I write this now is that I have really, really been enjoying internal medicine- I like the diagnosis, the management, the primary care aspect. But I see my interns and residents getting no sleep every 5th day (and if you aren't a meddie, imagine that for just one second. No sleep every 5th day for the next 4 years of your life... plus little sleep the rest of the time) and frankly, I don't know if I want to do it.

So, here I am again, thinking about the decision between doing what I love and doing something where the lifestyle doesn't suck. There's a damn good reason people go into pathology, anesthesia, radiology, and dermatology. You work real people hours, and you get paid a decent salary.

After all this time and energy, don't you think we deserve that?