Sunday, March 26, 2006

If I don't live right, I know where I'm going when I die

Many of you know that I am a psychiatry resident in South Carolina. What you may not know, is that in our first year we do a wide variety of work not limited to psychiatry. During the third year of med school you do everything for a month or two. This first year of residency is similar though I don't do "everything."

Right now I am on two months of non psychiatry internal medicine inpatient at the VA hospital. What that means pretty much is that if you have to stay in the hospital for anything besides surgery then I am one of those people who take care of you. As you may gather from the title of this post, it's not my favorite. It is the busiest I will ever be with work, doing a part of medicine that I don't particularly enjoy. I have been averaging 80 hours of work a week and to reiterate, the work itself is much worse than the hours are.

I really can't get. Everyone jokes about how their doctor sees them for like very few minutes, but no wonder as busy as they are. Are you having pain? The answer they want is yes or no and where, not how it is effecting your life or any other concerns you really have about it. This is somewhat of an exageration, but really only somewhat.

I finish this at the end of April, and I really can't wait. I mean I can deal with this for the short term, but some people make a career of it. I haven't spent 8 years of school and now training for another 4-5 years to have to work my butt off for the rest of my life. The big thing for all of us is enjoying the work, if I do that, it will never seem like real work.

1 comment:

Piccu said...

So that's where you've been lo these many months, hell. I understand the lack of posts now.