#525

...A funny thing happened with that last post. I set out to write it with the best intentions, and found half way through that the desire to finish it just wasn't there. My internship progressed from a state of constant reporting about my day - an intense need to be heard as I was "trying to tell you something about myself" - and I combed over every detail of every patient interaction with Tom with a fine toothed comb. And then suddenly, right after my father was hospitalized the first time in December, the words stopped coming. Suddenly, "I don't want to talk about it" became my most overused phrase. I once read that doctors make the worst cocktail party guests because they have nothing to say (or nothing that they actually can say). They spend their life in confidence with patients and stop living their own. I found that whole days of my life were devoted to medicine - even when I wasn't working. I would spend hours at my father's bedside trying to track down his doctors, or explain the latest idiosyncrasies in his care to my family. I stopped being human. All I wanted was to experience something. To feel something other than plainly overwhelmed.

Also, I think, the anger is troublesome and it's made me afraid to let anyone in. Internship turned me into a truly angry person. Angry that that parent cannot get their act together and buy their child's medicine. Angry that the parent won't stop buying soda. Angry that 3 month old babies sometimes are abused. Angry that the blood tech drew the special lab wrong - for the third time! - on a trach-dependent patient with horrendous veins (and no voice to express how much it hurts). Angry that the nurse just woke me up at 2A to ask me why my patient is on a medicine that they have been taking for the past 3 months (or to inform me that the patient is taking Flovent for sickle cell pain. Seriously?!) Angry that the ER resident told me he would personally escort my father to the CT scanner and then disappeared for the rest of the afternoon, leaving me to go retrieve him. Angry that my dad is septic...again. Angry that the bathtub cannot clean itself. Angry that food does not magically appear in my fridge. Angry that you're here in the ER again with your child for what amounts to a well child check. Angry that social issues are so damn hard to fix. Angry that I'm lonely and still worry if other people like me. Angry that I'm experiencing my 19th bout of compassion fatigue this year.

And it truly is anger. There is no other label for it.

But something magically switches the day you become a second year. You start making decisions for yourself. You suddenly transform. And this momentum has carried forward into all of my personal life. I'm reading novels again. I have a new haircut and a new skirt (and a few other new things Tom does not know about yet). Heck, I've got a new attitude. Maybe I'll exercise, maybe I'll start meditating. In any event, something good has to come out of this, right?