Where Credit Is Due

Just like that, my intern year is over. My replacement came to the workroom to introduce himself today, and I signed out my critical care patients to him. “You’re going to do great- I’m so excited for you,” I said to him, and I meant it. Before leaving, I finished my notes and I placed orders for morning labs for my remaining patients. I updated families and checked in with nursing about the plan of care.

Reflecting on the year it’s hard to distill how much I’ve learned- and how much more I have still to learn. Vent settings are still not my forte. With my heart failure patients, I still wonder if and when exactly “aggressive diuresis” becomes “too much diuresis.” My line placement still needs close supervision and a lot of practice.

Will I be OK when, in over a year from now, I return to Internal Medicine? 

Will I be able to transition to dermatology having done medicine now for 12 months? What do you even say when staffing a dermatology patient? Will I be able to do skin biopsies and sutures? What if sound like I don’t know what I’m doing? What if people find out that I don’t belong? 

Such are the thoughts that creep into my head when I think of what my life will look like just a week or so from now. My program has me transition to a year of entirely dermatology, become coming back again to medicine. After that, we flip flop between the two services for 3 months at at time for the remainder of the three years.

But while I have my moments of humility and doubt, I think about how profound this year has been for me and everything I’ve accomplished since graduating med school, including but not limited to:

• Moving across the country to a new city across the country where I have no connections. 
• Completing 6 inpatient rotations, working 6 days a week for 70+ hours a week. During most of these, I was pregnant.
• On that note, surviving a pregnancy. 
• HAVING A BABY (!)
• Undergoing open abdominal surgery (unplanned c-section) and recovery.
• Completing Step 3, the last exam required in my path to independent licensure in the US, with an above-average score. 

My intern year, what many feel to be the hardest year in post-graduate training is over. And I did it with style.