The Edge

I was thinking about my night on call, Saturday. It was pretty uneventful overnight, but I did have one patient that stood out. It was the "scary" patient on our service. The patient we are all scared of when we take a night on call, a little boy that was born ridiculously young. I remember getting check out where the intern lets me know the what's going on with his/her babies. The attending broke in and went into a small lecture on N.E.C. (necrotizing entercolitis) a really scary complication (basically the bowels die in the infant) and how they were really watching this one for it because it's had two episodes of vomiting and it had a slightly distended stomach over the day. She described all of the signs of N.E.C. and then she went into some other technical aspects. This morning when I was thinking about last night, about how uneventful it was, I was struck by how easily I remembered everything she had told me about N.E.C., even though nothing much had really happened. I had heard about N.E.C. before and I'd even read different papers on it, yet never had things so technical stick with me so easily before. When I thought about it I realized it's the difference between being a student vs an intern. When you a student the responsibility isn't yours, you aren't "scared" for you patient the way you are when you're the one actually taking care of them, when it's all on YOU. I'm scared of heights so this is a good analogy for me, maybe not for others, but it's like if you had to learn how to dance near a cliff. You're learning the moves, you're watching others "do" it, but you are clumsy and sometimes even make stupid impulsive mistakes because you can be. That's when you're the student. But when you're the intern it's like you're the person dancing on the edge of the cliff, think how differently you would do it, as opposed to just hanging out "near" it. Think how much faster you would learn the moves, doing it so much more carefully, thinking about every small thing you do, micro-analyzing even the simplest decision (you don't feel there is any room for error)...that's how scared I was of that baby last night...I didn't fall off though (not yet anyway)...and I learned from it...even though it was a very uneventful night (Thank God), ask me about N.E.C. sometime, I bet you a month from now I'll still be able to repeat my attending's small lecture word for word.

- a small side note -
I just felt my son kicking my wife's belly...that's amazing!

Newbie Doc