The Intern Blues(148)

From what Mark was saying and the way he was saying it, I got the impression that he didn’t enjoy his job all that much. “Do you like what you’re doing?” I asked.

“I love it,” he answered without hesitation. “I’m doing exactly what I wanted to do from the time I started medical school. Of course, back then, I thought I was going to do adult medicine. It wasn’t until my third-year rotations that I realized I liked kids and hated adults. But basically, yes, this is what I thought I’d be doing, having a practice, seeing patients. I get a real thrill out of seeing patients. There’s always something new. Plus, I’m the doctor for the local high-school track team, and, in the summer, I watch over the local Girl Scout camp. It’s a lot of fun.”

Next I asked Mark about his life away from the office. I reminded him that in the epilogue to The Intern Blues, I had described how he had romantically proposed to his then-girlfriend, Carole, in a rowboat on Candlewood Lake in Connecticut. “Did you two wind up getting married?”

“We certainly did get married,” he replied, “but not in a rowboat. We got married in a hotel ballroom in Manhattan. We had been living together since we got engaged, and I didn’t think it would be right for me to join the practice without us being married. I mean, what kind of an example would I be setting for my patients? So we tied the knot in May of my senior residency year. Carole wasn’t all that anxious to go ahead with it just then. She was in law school and didn’t have time for anything but studying. But I insisted and told her I’d take care of everything. I planned the whole thing, from the invitations to the honeymoon. All Carole had to do was show up. Afterwards, she told me I did such a good job that if my job didn’t work out, I could always become a wedding planner.”

“Do you have any kids?”

“One. A boy named Alex. He’s eight.”

Remembering what Andy had said about the ways that the experience of being a father had affected his work, I asked if Mark had had a similar experience. “Not really,” he explained. “I don’t think I approached my work any differently before Alex was born than I do now.”

Also, as with Andy, I asked Mark to think back and consider what effect internship had had on him. “As I said before, Bob,” he answered, “I don’t remember much about my internship, except that it was bad, definitely the worst year of my life. Nothing comes close to how bad it was. And the worst part wasn’t the hours or the sleeplessness, or anything like that, although those things were pretty bad. The worst part was the frustration and the fear that you were going to make a terrible mistake and kill some kid. They were taking people who hadn’t been trained to do things, who never had experience caring for critically ill patients on their own, and forcing them into situations where they were the ones making the decisions. That wasn’t fair to the interns, and it especially wasn’t fair to the patients. I think they’ve done a lot to fix that; I think the new laws that require that interns and residents be better supervised are definitely a good thing. But that wasn’t the case when I was an intern. And because of that, it was by far the worst experience of my life.”

“Was it worth it?”

Mark’s response was essentially the same as Andy’s: “Yeah, I think it was worth it. It’s like my running. Since I was in high school, I’ve been a marathon runner. In order to qualify to run in a marathon, you have to prove you’re worthy. In other words, you have to do a lot of shit in order to get to where you want to be. Internship is the shit you have to do in order to practice medicine. I like my job; I like my life. And doing internship and residency was the only way I could get to this point. So definitely, yes, it was worth it. Just don’t tell me I have to do it over again. Boy, that would be bad!”





When she left the Bronx, Amy Horowitz left virtually no footprints. After all these years, she was by far the most difficult of the three former interns to locate. There were no hits on any Internet search engines, no letters of recommendation, no requests for verification of training. No other information on her whereabouts was revealed during a thorough search through her files in our departmental offices. I even called the Office of Alumni Affairs at the Albert Schweitzer School of Medicine for help; although they had her name listed as a bona fide graduate of the school, they had her listed as “lost,” with no current address available. It looked as if I was stuck.

I was about to give up when I decided to try one last strategy. Figuring that her father would know where she was (Amy’s mother had passed away while she’d been in college), I called Schweitzer’s admissions office, hoping to get the home address she’d listed when she’d filled out her medical school application twenty years ago. A secretary in the office volunteered to try to retrieve Amy’s application from its microfiche resting place; successful, she called me back in less than an hour with both the phone number and address. Calling the number, I didn’t have a great deal of hope that Amy’s father would still live there; still, I felt I had to give it a shot.