It was a rough week for me in the MICU. I'm not sure what it was exactly, because the work didn't get harder, nor the people meaner. I guess, in the first week, I had an excuse for not knowing things, but now that I've been there a while, I feel like I should be getting better at everything. Instead, I feel like I'm going nowhere.
So I met with my advisor for the first time this week, and it happened to be on a day when I was admitting someone from the ED and didn't fully understand her story. I felt like my resident was trying to hide her irritation at my presentation and not doing a very good job, which is actually worse than having someone be outright irritated at you. Anyway, my advisor talked about himself a little bit, about his research and his family, and then said, "So tell me a little about yourself." So I said to him that it was really difficult to have a simple, pleasant conversation because I couldn't put my mind in that place, because MICU was very stressful and I was doing a terrible job. But after saying that I told him about where I was from and about my family. Then, he pulled out a paper that he was working on about intern confidence levels and how they change throughout the year, and he showed me the graph, and it was shaped something of a Nike symbol, starting somewhere in the middle, then dipping down before steadily climbing back up. It was another one of those times when I felt like God was listening, like he knew what I needed. Because only people very close to me know how much I enjoy graphs, how useful I think they are. (Back when we were dating, Ted and I found it useful to graph certain aspects of our relationship. Believe it or don't.) And my advisor said, "See, we have data to explain what you are going through." Then he reminded me that intern year isn't really about impressing people, it's only about survival.
I recently wrote out my very first death pronouncement. I couldn't remember exactly how it was supposed to go, and it took me a long time to figure it out so that it sounded dignified and appropriate. What I ended up writing was something like this: "On this day, August 9, 2006, at 8:54 p.m., I was called to examine Ms. _____. She was unresponsive, with no breath sounds bilaterally, no heart sounds, and both pupils fixed and dilated. Based on these physical findings, I pronounce that Ms. ____ has died. Dr. ____ and her son have been notified." I have a lot more to say about it, but I think what I've written is already too dark for this blog. But it was a big enough deal to me, and it certainly makes the cloud over my head just a little bit greyer.
So today was my day off, and I got to be home and forget about it all for just some little minutes. We went canoeing in a lake, and only Dad got to paddle because I was busy trying to keep Ruby from slipping and hurting herself. We played this game of throwing these toy sharks into the lake, and then paddling over to them and letting the kids pull them out of the water. We were saving the sharks from the water.
