The Intern Blues(56)

The other problem about going on vacation is my schedule. We’ve got tickets to leave from Kennedy International Airport on Monday, October 28, at 11:00 A.M. My vacation officially starts that morning, but of course I’m on call the night before. If I work that night, as I’m supposed to, there’s no way I’ll be able to make it out of the hospital before nine o’clock in the morning. And considering that I’ll be signing out to interns who have never been on the ward before and don’t know any of the patients, it’ll probably be much later than that. There’s no way I’m going to make it to the airport on time. So I’m trying to make a change. The only person I could possibly switch with is one of the subinterns. She says she’ll think about it, but she’s not committing herself yet. If she can’t do it, I just might not show up that day.

Sunday, October 20, 1985

I got into a big fight with Marie on Wednesday. I was postcall and tired but I knew we needed some things, so I called before leaving the hospital and told her I was going to be stopping at the supermarket and was there anything special we needed? She said there wasn’t, so I just got the things I knew we needed. Then when I got home, I found out we were out of Pampers. I went crazy! “Didn’t you realize we were out of diapers?” I asked. She said she forgot, and I let her have it! The bottom line was that the baby had to spend the night without a diaper change because I was too tired to go out again.

Then Larry yelled at me for yelling at Marie, and I let him have it, too. I told him I wasn’t a superwoman, I couldn’t do everything. I can’t be expected to work and take care of the baby and do the shopping and the cooking. I told him he was going to have to pitch in more and do some of the things that needed to be done around the house. Then after I let him have it, I felt even worse because I hate fighting with him. He’s one of those people who just doesn’t fight back; he never seems to get mad. He’s so calm, it drives me crazy! So we’ve been fighting a cold war since then.

And things are terrible at work. I hate my patients, except Lisa [the young woman with choriocarcinoma]; I hate the house staff I’m working with, except for Susannah, who’s had the flu herself; but most of all, I hate the medical students. They’re terrible. I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve got this third-year student who’s been assigned to me the past two weeks. He actually deserves to fail. He’s an M.D.-Ph.D. [a special track in which college graduates are accepted for a course of study that will ultimately grant then both an M.D. and a Ph.D. degree; Schweitzer accepts a handful of these students each year], and he’s got this attitude problem. He thinks he doesn’t have to do anything, all he has to do is show up. I ask him to go and check labs and do other scut and he actually refuses. He says it’s not in his job description.

And the subinterns are big pains also. I asked one to switch with me so I don’t have to be on the last night of the month. At first she said she’d think about it. Then a few days later she said she’d do it. Then this week she told me she’d decided she couldn’t switch for some reason. She didn’t tell me why, but it doesn’t matter. It was the one time this whole year I really needed somebody to help me out, and nobody would do it. So now I don’t know what I’m going to do. Maybe I’ll just walk out of the hospital early the next morning. I mean, I’m not going to miss my flight.

My patient with the brain tumor died last week. He had been in a coma for about a week. After talking it over with his parents, we all agreed to make him a DNR. I don’t think he was in much pain; his heart just stopped one night and they declared him dead. I never got a chance to talk to him. He was always so angry when he was conscious.

At least Lisa’s doing much better. I’m glad about that. She’s the only patient I care about right now. Her mouth sores are better and she’s able to eat again. She finished her first course of chemo and she’s not nauseous anymore. She’s actually improving; she’s about the only patient all month who has gotten better.

I told Lisa about Sarah on Friday. She asked me if I was married and I told her about Larry and the baby. She said she was happy for me and that she was really sorry that she wasn’t still pregnant because she really wanted a baby of her own. She said she thought I must be a good mother because I’m a doctor and I know what to do when children got sick. I don’t know about that, but it was a nice thing for her to say. She said she’d like to meet Sarah sometime, so maybe tomorrow, when I’m on call, I’ll have Larry bring her over to the hospital.