The Farmer and the Fighter

There are different factions of medicine acute versus preventative.  In some ways you can compare them to the navy seals versus the farmers.  You need both, both are essential.  The navy seals, they are what you think of when you watch tv, they are the people on the front lines when death comes to claim your loved ones, the standing commanders running the group actively doing chest compressions, knifing in chest tubes, and shocking your hearts back to life.  Then there are the farmers, depending on your frame of reference, while less glamorous  they are equally or one may argue even more important than the Navy Seals they make movies about.  You can't make very good movies about a group of people that consistently stops problems before they even start, it's not very exciting, yet even a Navy Seal will secomb to starvation.   Once back in the dawn of time, the people who did the fighting and the people who did the farming were the same people. It was less civilized, less specialized, but they got the job done in a place and time when you couldn't have your cake and eat it too.  There are places even today, where that still goes on, where the villager is out plowing the fields and in a second, drops his implement for a spear and goes to war.  Just as you might think, those places are not as safe as your perfect, specialized, urbanized world that most of us have gotten used to.  In the medical world, that holds true too.  Out in the small communities there is still need for a doc that can do a little bit of everything and I'm terrified and honored to say that, if I understand my future job right, I'm joining their ranks.  I could intubate a dieing child in the middle of the night and the next morning be giving shots that prevent illness years from infection.  I hope I'm strong enough, I hope I'm good enough to do both jobs to the standard that I've held myself to for the last three years.  The doctors that I'm joining are "old" docs, born of residency before work hour restrictions, before they started "watering" us down.  They pulled 36 hour shifts every 3 days, sometimes back to back.  It wasn't safe, but those who survived came out medical power houses.  I pulled Q4 30 hour shifts (ie every 4 days I worked 30), "they" have since then deemed even that too hard to work, safely.  In my third year as a resident, I feel confident and strong,  yet I know just as I wasn't and couldn't be prepared for internship as a medical school student, there is no possible way I can be prepared for what I face as an attending of "rural" pediatric medicine, I'll be the farmer plowing day in and day out, but even still my spear has to lay sharp and at the ready in my tent for the lions that approach in the night.  What am I getting myself into?  I'll keep you posted, hopefully with my good results :)

Newbie-Doc