My wife wrote this on her facebook page. I loved it.
Awhile back, the “25 Things About Me” meme was pretty popular on Facebook. I’ll admit, I did it- it’s fun to broadcast all these bits and pieces of myself into cyberspace. But it was pretty self-serving. Do any of you really care about my first job, first car, or my most embarrassing moments?
But now there’s something about me that I really do feel like sharing. I’m sounding my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
That’s right, folks. I am no longer an intern.
(Well, technically I am. I still have to go in early tomorrow for bullshit cross cover on 10C. But my months of doing random intern rotations are over the moment I walk out the building tomorrow. I’m spending the last month in radiology; and as far as I’m concerned, it’s a brave new world down there.)
I was an intern on internal medicine, general surgery, the ED, trauma surgery, the PICU, peds urgent care, pathology, and a few other random things like ortho and rheum. I think it’s fair to say I’ve been on almost every service in the hospital. I’ve taken care of neonates in the NICU, and I’ve done autopsies. Seen far too many people die this year, but just one being born (well, I was doing the birthing). Some months were much more emotionally and physically difficult than others. And honestly, there were a lot of fun times. I got lucky and had a pretty nice year overall and met some very cool people. But it still sucked the big one most of the time.
So, fellow interns, soon-to-be interns, people who were interns once, and the curious other few who might peruse this, I give you…
25 Things I Won’t Miss About Intern Year
1. The Goldenrod Form: An ugly yellow piece of paper you have to fill out when patients go to a nursing home. It’s so ugly it hurts my eyes; it’s like pee that sat in a bedpan too long and had half its free water content evaporate off. The space to write meds is horribly small. I’m sure some nurse somewhere couldn’t read my crappy handwriting and gave a patient 400 mg of Lasix qD.
2. Waking up at 4:30 (or earlier, on gen surg) every morning. Falling asleep at 9:30 pm. Falling asleep in the middle of a conversation. Feeling like people in Target/at preschool/my neighbors must think I’m drunk or stoned because my eyes are bloodshot and I can barely get a sentence out.
3. Environmental services staff who buff floors and vacuum rugs right next to us during rounds. You guys do a great job, really, but do you have to literally vacuum under the chair I’m sitting in when I’m post-call and fumbling my way through a presentation?
4. The Trauma Bomb: 6776. I will remember that number forever.
5. Tele alarms. I hear you in my sleep.
6. Watching five fat, breathless hospital cops try to wrestle my demented 78 year-old crackhead patient back from the elevators. Didn’t work. Actually, I might miss this, cause it was so damn funny to watch.
7. Bouncebacks.
8. Short calls.
9. Swallowers.
10. Drunk members of a certain family (well-known to 10C) who threaten me. You know who you are. Next time I’m calling security. I mean it.
11. Kids kept alive, born at 23 weeks, now trached and PEGed and living in an LTAC in between PICU admissions. Sucks.
12. Smelly trachs. It must suck to have a trach, and I don’t mean to make fun of anyone who has one, but sometimes the smell they emit makes me gag. And the stuff that gets sucked out? Forget it. I just threw up.
13. Patients who insist on repeatedly calling me honey, sweetie, lady, or nurse, even after I remind them I’m their doctor. It’s not hard. I call you Mr. Smith. You call me Dr. Wilson. Get it? Apparently not.
14. The ED. I’m sorry, Deb and John, it’s just not for me. No part of it. But please come see me often in the rads reading room. I’ll be the one in the rocker, eating popcorn in the dark with my ipod on.
15. The smell of horrific gingivitis and that weird yellow gunk that accumulates around the teeth of those who don’t floss.
16. Patients who want me to check out “this spider bite on my ass/nuts/labia.”
17. Tripping and dropping 3 pagers down a stairwell, all of which are going off (true story, happened on rainbow surg call one night)
18. Diabetic nails, gnarly toes, scaly skin. Get thee to a podiatrist.
19. The plastic pillows in the call rooms. Covered with microbes due to years of resident sweat and drool accumulating on them.
20. Digital rectal exams. I feel dirty just seeing a package of Surgilube. I apologize to anyone whose behind I violated. I tried to be gentle, really.
21. The Metrohealth Cafe’s weird obsession with fish. Face it, you can’t do a damn thing to make your cod, scrod, tilapia or salmon palatable to me.
22. The smell of poop that permeates 5A/5C SICU. It’s killer.
23. My stethoscope. Like a noose around my neck. Only I don’t wear it around my neck, I keep it in my pocket. Cause I’m cool like that.
24. Calling bullshit consults cause someone else made me do it. Usually to Ortho or Neurosurg. The call is inevitably returned by some snarling dude who talks to me like I’m an idiot.
And finally…
25. Those two dudes who seem to be preying on the unlucky Clevelanders just mindin’ their own business, sittin’ on the porch, or walkin’ home from church. At 3 am.
Actually, I’d like to thank those two dudes. You bring my hospital a lot of business. (Not that we’re getting paid for it, but whatever).