Sunday, November 14, 2004
Residency is great training for more than Medicine
Residency is about survival. Aside from learning medicine, residents learn about themselves. The TV show "Scrubs" or the book "House of God" by Shrem are pretty accurate at depicting the people who inhabit hospitals, their relationships and the mentality of a teaching environment.
What they do not convey is the feeling that every resident has when they have been on call too long, too many nights, are covering too many patients and have too many tasks to do. Add to that a pager that beeps incessantly, a senior who hates you, a junior or teammate who is incompetent, fatigue, hunger and the need to take a massive piss and you have a meltdown in the making. If you can survive this without a substance abuse problem, a nervous tic, the need for counseling and/or medication, the nuts and bolts of child care will be that much easier.
For example:
When dining with Kayla, my WW and I utilize dining skills acquired and honed in Residency. In the hospital we ate when we could, standing up, when we weren't hungry, while grazing at nurses' stations, at alarming speeds and always while multitasking. Same could be said when dining with Kayla.
We are the masters of running on empty. Getting up in the middle of the night or making due without sleep is a fact of life for a resident. If you actually get some rest, the most difficult part is "sleeping with one ear open" to listen for your pager or your baby monitor. When you are on call, you can never predict when it is going to go off, but Kayla is somewhat predictable. She basically sleeps from 8 pm to 4:30 - 6:30 am and then until about 7:30 am. There is nothing enjoyable about middle of the night feeds but I have found that I have adjusted my sleep to Kayla's schedule.
Every aspect of my life has been altered by Kayla's presence. Even the most mundane activity of daily living (read going to the bathroom) has taken on new a new significance to which I've had to adjust.
Most of all, residency has taught me to be flexible, to be compassionate and to plan for the worst and hope for the best. Hopefully I will always remember to use these skills while raising Kayla.
What they do not convey is the feeling that every resident has when they have been on call too long, too many nights, are covering too many patients and have too many tasks to do. Add to that a pager that beeps incessantly, a senior who hates you, a junior or teammate who is incompetent, fatigue, hunger and the need to take a massive piss and you have a meltdown in the making. If you can survive this without a substance abuse problem, a nervous tic, the need for counseling and/or medication, the nuts and bolts of child care will be that much easier.
For example:
When dining with Kayla, my WW and I utilize dining skills acquired and honed in Residency. In the hospital we ate when we could, standing up, when we weren't hungry, while grazing at nurses' stations, at alarming speeds and always while multitasking. Same could be said when dining with Kayla.
We are the masters of running on empty. Getting up in the middle of the night or making due without sleep is a fact of life for a resident. If you actually get some rest, the most difficult part is "sleeping with one ear open" to listen for your pager or your baby monitor. When you are on call, you can never predict when it is going to go off, but Kayla is somewhat predictable. She basically sleeps from 8 pm to 4:30 - 6:30 am and then until about 7:30 am. There is nothing enjoyable about middle of the night feeds but I have found that I have adjusted my sleep to Kayla's schedule.
Every aspect of my life has been altered by Kayla's presence. Even the most mundane activity of daily living (read going to the bathroom) has taken on new a new significance to which I've had to adjust.
Most of all, residency has taught me to be flexible, to be compassionate and to plan for the worst and hope for the best. Hopefully I will always remember to use these skills while raising Kayla.
