Tuesday, October 26, 2004

Mixed Up Inside

All good things, and bad, must come to an end, or at least, should. Tonight, I wished my interns a farewell and a “good luck”. One of them I will continue to see for another two years, the other, I may see but who knows. Big H rotates through our hospital just to get a feel for medicine in a community institution. Hers is a nicely furnished private medical center more befitting people who graduated from the big H in B town.
This is a happy time for me because in one regard I would like nothing more than to put this behind me. The Real Patient incident was truly devastating and I don’t think that I recovered from it just yet. I have not had one night without images of the incident and her face on that day penetrating my deepest conscience and expressed in winces of horror on my face. Every day there is another aspect of the case I am being reminded of. If not by an interested third party then by my attending who is finally accepting that it is possible we made the wrong decision, although slowly.
On the other hand, I really liked my team and we have had an amazing month together. The tragedies have somehow brought us closer together and we have had to rely on each other for moral support. I will miss DCFA (“Don’t cry for me Argentina- the second resident, she is Argentinian) but I will get to witness her slowly growing to become a fully functional team of her own.
I will definitely miss my sub-I from the D in NC. Although having him ask me nearly everything from what to do to what he should have for lunch has gotten kind of old, he really is an amazingly hard worker and probably cares about his patients (or his grade) more than I could have imagined.
More than the others, I will miss Big H. Throughout the month we spent every call together and most of the day together. After learning a lot about who she is and some of the things she’s accomplished I am not at all surprised that the big H decided to draft this phenom. Although as an intern she is equivalent to DCFA I have to say that as a person she is one of the most amazing people I have ever met.

Tonight, after all the “Keep in touch’s” and “Good luck” with this or that we went our separate ways. We will probably all cross paths one day. We’ll have a hard time remembering each other’s names then and all we’ll say is “He used to be my resident”. We’ll remember what kind of time it was, we’ll remember if we learned anything that month. I’ll remember only one thing then: It was the worst of time and it was the best of times.