The Intern Blues(142)

Saturday, June 28, 1986

Well, it’s over. It’s all over. I am no longer an intern. As of nine o’clock this morning, I officially became a junior resident. No more internship! Ever! No more daily progress notes! No more blood-drawing! No more IVs! No more fighting with lab technicians! No more fighting with elevator operators! No more mock-turkey sandwiches! No more patients who are as sick as Hanson! No more Hanson!!

I think you can see here that I’m exaggerating a little. I think you can also see that I’m completely out of control! And I don’t care! Because I’ll never have to be an intern anymore, never again. Hooray!

This morning at about eight o’clock, I was drawing the morning blood and whistling. Yes, I’ve been whistling on blood-drawing rounds over the past few weeks because it’s such fun! Anyway, I’m walking around the unit whistling and jabbing great big needles into my wonderful patients because I love them all so much and this guy who looked lost and scared to death came in and asked, “Is this the nursery?” Guess who he was? He was . . . an intern. He was the intern who was on call in the NICU today! And I didn’t know who the fuck he was! Because he’s brand-new!

I told him he was in the right place and I showed him where to get a set of scrubs and then I showed him the patients. While I was doing this, I stayed between him and the door at all times because I was sure that at some point or other he was going to bolt, leave the hospital, and never come back, and I’d have to stay and be on call again. But he didn’t leave. He was really nervous, but he seemed very enthusiastic. It was like I was talking to a member of a completely different species on the evolutionary tree. He took notes on this clean pad on this brand-new clipboard. He didn’t ask any questions, and I’m convinced he didn’t understand a single word I said to him.

Anyway, I finished rounding with him at about ten and then we all gathered in the West Bronx library and the party started. A bunch of us were sitting in there, drinking champagne and getting soused. At ten in the morning. We stayed until about eleven, when the bar across the street opened, and then we all went over there for brunch. It might seem strange that ten or eleven interns would be sitting around a bar drinking at eleven o’clock in the morning, but hell, we weren’t alone. The place was packed! It wasn’t only pediatrics that changed over today; medicine and surgery changed also, and everyone was getting loaded. Anyway, we stayed there until about two. I just came home to take a nap and get ready for the real partying, which will start tonight.

I thought when it was all over, I’d have all these great, profound thoughts about internship. I’ve been trying to think of something profound to say all day, but I can’t come up with a single thing. Internship sucks, that’s all there is to it. It just flat-out sucks. But hey, it’s not my problem anymore. I’m no longer part of that lower class of humanity! I’m pretty sure that if you come to me in five years and ask me if I thought my internship was a good or a bad experience, I’ll probably tell you it was bad but that there were a lot of good things about it. That’s what happens to people when they stop being so depraved. Right now, I can assure you there is absolutely nothing good about internship. Nothing.

Well, that’s not exactly true. I’ve worked with a whole bunch of nice people whom I never would have come to know had I not been here. And I had a lot of good times. And I had two wonderful vacations I’ll remember for the rest of my life.

See, it’s been over for only five hours, and already my mind is warping. Do you think there’s any hope for me?





Bob


EPILOGUE

Wednesday, February 25, 1987

About seven months ago, on a sunny Wednesday morning near the end of last June, as Amy, Andy, and Mark were beginning to celebrate the end of their year of internship, I got into my car and drove up to Peter Anderson’s house in Westchester County. At about eleven o’clock that morning I found myself sitting on the grass outside Dr. Anderson’s front door and asking three scared-to-death interns-to-be what most worried them. My question was met by an intense silence that lasted for what seemed like minutes. Finally, one of the new interns, a guy named Anthony D’Aquila, meekly said, “The thing I’m most worried about is the night call. I just don’t think I’m going to be able to survive a whole year of being on call every third night. I can’t understand how you can be up all night every third night and still be able to function the next day.”

Slowly, the other two interns joined in, agreeing with Anthony. Then one of the others, a woman named Andrea Zisman, said that she was worried about what internship would do to her social life. She told us that she’d had a steady relationship with a guy for the past three years; he was a lawyer, and she was concerned that the life-style of an intern would completely destroy this long-term relationship.