Suddenly I find myself in a scary position. I'm a senior resident. I'm expected to know something. I have doctors under my command. When I have a question I look around for my senior only to realize that it's my time, I'm the man whose supposed to have the answers...HA!!
Now I'm on cancer service, a service reserved for "upper level" residents. I don't have the slightest clue what's going on with my patients...they are "complex". I read constantly...I thought I "read" before.
Last night I had 3 leukemics come in. One parent cried on me. These days it's like I feel the sadness waying in on me but it meets a wall. I know deep down I'm really sad, but it's like a callus on your hand. The first time it stings, after the one hundredth time, you still feel the pain, but it's dulled. Sometimes when I'm tired I have to make a conscious effort to put myself in their shoes, so I can relate and they don't feel like I'm robot-doc. It sounds cold but the "dulling" effect happens without trying, you might think it's awful, you might think you'd never feel that way, but I'd say roughly twice a week I have a parent cry on me and I have to comfort them, you become very good at it and you become very relaxed in situations where the person sitting a crossed from you is flipping out. The point is that this would happen to anybody, it's just one of those things you don't expect. The thing you never imagine is that the hard part is pretending to act like you haven't been in that situation a billion times and acting like each new crisis is actually a new crisis.
Why do you do this? There's the obvious reason, you don't want the parents getting hostile. There's the reason that you first imagine, the slimey doctor is trying to buddy up to the person in trouble. The reason I do it is because the family and you have to be on the same side. A patient won't get better if they don't take the treatment and they don't believe in you, so some of what I do is selling them on me. It sounds disingenuous, but it's for their own good. I believe at the end of the day a patient wants a human treating them, not a robot, not even necessarily a doctor.
Newbie Doc
