Salvage

These months are painful to my ego.  I enjoy the work, but it's punishing, every day working with people that you feel can smash you with size of their medical intellect, whatever competence you felt you had built up in the last three years is immediately destroyed for the time that you spend in the PICU.  I had a second to sit and talk with one of my attendings and realized in discussing his past leading up to his job here at the PICU that he has been practicing intensive care medicine longer than I have been alive (that is insane), to my surprise, every attending in the ICU has practiced intensive care for my entire life span or more.  Day in day out, feeling stupid and inexperienced next to these guys, suddenly it makes alot of sense...I'm not unlike that younger brother that thinks he should be just as big and capable as his much older siblings.  I've spent 3 months time total in the PICU over 3 years, these guys have been practicing almost every day for 30 plus years.  I can't imagine how deep I would understand the human body after practicing medicine that long.  Suddenly their insight into illness and it's intervention isn't so inexplicable, the ventilator machines they worked with in residency are literally in museums.  There is so much to learn from these docs.  Part of me really wants to be one of them, I could be if I stayed, went into fellowship, took another residency essentially, but I'm worn out...my family is worn out, I'm quiting while I'm ahead...but part of me still wants to push, to be at that level, a paragon of medicine knowledge and human physiology...however, I feel like if I did that I'd be making my life even more medicine that what it already is, and that really wouldn't leave much life in me at all.

Newbie Doc