The Intern Blues(11)

I didn’t get home this morning until after four and I didn’t get much sleep. I’m exhausted. But what can I do? This is the way internship is, and I’ve just got to survive it. At least I’ve got tomorrow off. Then I’m on again on Sunday for the last time this month. Larry’s team has a softball game on Sunday, so he’s going to take Sarah with him. Thank God he’s so good with her! He takes her everywhere he goes when I’m on. I don’t know what I’d do if he weren’t so understanding or helpful. If I do make it through this year, it’s because of Larry.

I start at University Hospital on Monday. I don’t know what that’s going to be like. I’ve heard bad things about it. I don’t care if it’s hard or boring or whatever. All I care about is getting out at a reasonable hour.





Mark


JULY 1985

Friday, June 28, 1985

My internship officially starts tomorrow. I’ve waited for this day a long time, years, the way people wait for their arteries to clog up enough for them to have a heart attack. I’m starting on 6A, the ward at West Bronx. I talked to some of the old interns and they told me that 6A was a pretty horrible place to work, that the nursing stinks, the lab technicians were impossible, and, on a good day, the clerical staff mostly just ignored you. Sounds like my kind of place! I like a challenge like that. It’s just what I need, a little more aggravation. And of course I’m on tomorrow night, the first day of the year. Just my luck; I’ll probably also be on call every holiday and the last day of the year as well.

At least orientation’s over. It was a lot of fun, if your idea of fun is hanging around a bunch of terrified lunatics who are just figuring out that they’ve made a terrible mistake in their career choice and have ruined their entire lives. It really wasn’t that bad; at least the food was good.

It’s funny, my coming here to Schweitzer. I worked with AIDS patients in New Jersey during med school and I became pretty convinced it was a disease I didn’t want to experience personally. So I was looking for a program that didn’t have a lot of AIDS patients, and Schweitzer didn’t exactly top the list of places meeting that criterion. I went on some other interviews and got a look at some of the other programs and suddenly the Bronx didn’t look all that bad to me. So whatever happens during this internship, I can’t blame anybody but myself; it’s all my fault.

Carole wasn’t all that happy about my coming here. I guess I should mention Carole. We’ve been going out off and on since we were seniors in college. She’s an accountant in Manhattan and she lives in New Jersey, so my being in the Bronx is probably the worst thing that could happen to our relationship. We’ll probably never get to see each other over the next year. Not that it would be much better if I were working in Manhattan. It’s pretty hard to keep up a reputation as Mr. Romance when you’re working a hundred hours a week. Oh, well; being an intern is probably going to be like becoming a monk; except monks have a stronger union  , I think.

Well, I’m going to try to get some sleep now. I’m sure I’ll wind up walking around the apartment half the night. I’ve got all these butterflies in my stomach, and it feels like they’ve just organized a softball game.

Monday, July 1, 1985

What a great idea it is to start new interns on Saturday! What better way to greet someone who’s not only completely new to the hospital and doesn’t even know where the bathrooms are, but also who has never worked as an intern before, than to have him cover a ward filled with twenty-five sick patients, none of whom he’s ever seen. I wonder who came up with that brilliant stroke of genius?

Needless to say, Saturday was a complete disaster. I started off the day just nervous, but by the time we finished work rounds at about ten, I was completely petrified. I mean, they had kids with meningitis who could die without batting an eyelash, kids with asthma who were on oxygen, and they were telling me to do things like “Get a blood gas on that kid” [blood gas: an analysis of the acid, oxygen, and carbon dioxide levels in the blood; usually performed on patients in respiratory distress]. “Check the X ray on that kid,” “That other kid needs a new IV,” etc., etc. I had to sit down for an hour after rounds, just to talk myself out of quitting right then!

I have to admit, the technical stuff is about the only thing I can do. So I started off by drawing all the bloods and starting the IVs that were needed. Then I was heading for the lab, wherever the hell that was, when I got called down to the emergency room to pick up a patient. And that was the first time I got lost. I couldn’t believe it, I wound up wandering around in the basement of the hospital for twenty minutes, having no idea where I was. I found the morgue, I found the Engineering Department, but the ER seemed to be missing. I had this medical student with me, but he wasn’t much help; this was the second week of his first rotation and he was more confused than I was, if such a thing was possible. We finally found a guy down there who spoke English and I asked him where the ER was. He laughed at me for a few minutes and then told me I was on the wrong floor, it was one flight up.