Thursday, December 12, 1985, 11:00 P.M.
I don’t think I’ve put much of an entry into this thing for a long time. I think I’ve made it out of my month or two of depression, and I haven’t felt the need to vent about things as badly. Even though I’ll still wind up cursing about life, and I still hate being on call more than anything else I can ever remember hating, and I’m still chronically tired, I’m definitely not depressed anymore. I don’t know why; maybe it’s because I know vacation’s coming up very soon. Maybe it’s because I’m so goddamned used to working all the time now. Maybe it’s because I like working on 8 East because of the social feel of the place; it’s as if the whole staff is part of one big family. I just don’t know.
I find myself looking back on the past six months and realizing that so far this is the month I’ve enjoyed the most out of all of them. Jonas Bronck and my month at University Hospital are definitely my two favorites. Isn’t that strange? University Hospital was like a torture chamber half the time. But there were some really nice things about it, too. Cute nurses, that helped, but I think it was also because the patients were complicated and interesting. Or maybe it was just because it seemed like it was just us residents against everybody else. I think I like the idea of working in a tertiary-care hospital. Everything is right there, there aren’t any interruptions from the emergency room or the clinics or anyplace else; it gives you a sense of self-containment. But I also like Jonas Bronck, which is just the opposite. It’s hard to justify that, it’s hard to figure how I can like two such different systems.
I have to present chief of service rounds again tomorrow. [These rounds are held every Friday at noon at Jonas Bronck Hospital. An interesting case is selected, a summary is prepared and presented by the responsible intern, and the patient is discussed in depth by the faculty’s expert in that particular field. It’s a well-liked teaching conference, but it’s a pain in the ass for the overworked intern who has to prepare the presentation.] I wish they’d ask somebody else. It takes a long time to get that stuff together. I did it once already this month and I had to do a grand rounds, too. [Grand rounds, held on Wednesday at noon, are occasionally constructed around an in-house patient. As in the case of chief of service rounds, the intern caring for the patient is responsible for preparing the case presentation.]
We’ve got a pretty good team this month. Our senior, Pat Cummings, has turned out to be okay. I actually like him; he’s a good resident. He’s kind of got a gruff, hard edge to him, but other than that he’s a funny guy.
And I like my medical student. We spent a fair amount of time together today, doing scut. Makes all the difference in the world to do scut with another person. We had to stick some kid five times to get his IV in. I finally got it in, and it ran like a dream. I hope the damned kid doesn’t kick it out tonight. It looked good enough to stay in a couple of days.
Last night wasn’t too bad. I got four admissions and I managed to get a couple of hours of sleep. And I got everything done. For me that’s good. I couldn’t do that at the beginning of the year. If I got four admissions back in August, I’d be up all night, writing and writing and writing. Now I write less and go to sleep. By the end of the year, I should be able to do ten or twelve a night. Ten or twelve admissions a night—boy, is that a horrible thought.
I’ve got the FIB service [FIB: fever in baby]. I have six patients and they have a combined age of about nine months. And they all look and act alike; it’s hard to tell one apart from all the others. It’s not very interesting.
I ran into Mike Miller the other day. When he saw me, he kind of frowned. And I sort of frowned when I saw him frown. I said, “What’s the face?” He said, “Well, I’m just sad you’re going to be leaving and you’re not going to be around here next year.” I don’t know if that’s what he was really frowning about. At any rate, it was a nice thing to say.
This tape recorder’s kind of annoying me; it’s making weird noises. It’s hypnotizing me . . . Well, you get the idea. Those sleeping noises go on for the remainder of this tape, which I’ll be recording over now, because ten minutes of sleeping noises aren’t very exciting. I fell asleep again, fell asleep while recording on this fucking tape recorder.
Sunday, December 22, 1985
I’ve actually wanted to talk into this machine for a few days but I ran out of tapes and haven’t had a chance to get any until now. It wasn’t that I was saving up anything much to say, just the sense of having something to say.