I suck at this.

July 2, 2007 at 6:58 pm | Posted in internship | Leave a comment

Ugh! I’m so frustrated with myself today. It was my first day as the ICU intern, and I can’t stand how tentative I am about everything. It’s like I can’t quite get my act together enough to look competent. Between the stuff I know I’m supposed to know and don’t, and the stuff I don’t even know I’m supposed to know, I forget to present the big picture, and get lost in the details. Or I have too much big picture and not enough details. And I’m not slick enough to hide my incompetence behind a facade of big words and literature citations.

Although I’d like to point out the fact that no one has actually said anything demeaning or derogatory to me about my Vast Knowledge Vacuum (VKV, for short–no doubt I’ll be referring to it numerous times throughout this year). And that’s the thing: it’s completely unnecessary. The feeling of inadequacy is shameful enough all by itself. I think if someone were mean to me about it, all that would do is give me an excuse to turn my anger outward instead of using it as motivation to improve.

Nobody gets this far without some kind of intense internal drive to do things well and correctly. And that’s not something you want to subvert by externalizing it.

Anyway, it was a rough day. Not only did we have a very sick patient in the ICU, but it was a pediatric patient. And I just wasn’t prepared to handle a septic, desquamating pediatric ICU patient. At all. Especially on my first day in the unit. So my senior had to take over. And the attending spent an hour or two at the bedside as well.

Reading that makes me feel a little better: it was an attending level crisis, after all. But still. I was so thrown off my game that, down in the ER seeing a new patient, I nearly introduced myself as a medical student. I certainly felt like one at that point. Now that’s bad. I didn’t even feel like a medical student when I was a medical student.

It also made me feel a little better to find out that the other intern hadn’t gotten his assigned tasks finished that day either. He had to sign out a consent to the night intern. But still…I will be on top of things tomorrow if it kills me.