|
||||||||
|
FORUMA Farewell to Residency
"It was something, and yet it was nothing," commented my friend as we walked out of our graduation ceremony. We had finally made it to the end of residency, a moment that I had been dreaming of since before I started medical school. I remembered my tears of anticipation as I listened to the graduation ceremony going on outside my dorm window while studying for my first-year medical school finals. Back then, the moment of graduation seemed so poignant, so weighty. I could taste freedom. But now that it was finally my turn, the moment seemed dull and deflated. The exhilaration I expected never arrived. As I sat talking about the graduation with Carlos, my husband and fellow resident, we finally decided that graduation recognized only part of our residency experience—the completion of our training. Yet during residency, learning was only part of the reason we showed up to work each day. We also cared about our patients, our colleagues, our students, our hospital. We stayed the extra hour to place the NG tube, to complete an admission, to help a family understand what tests the child would need. We sat up all night caring for critically ill children and still made it to clinic the next afternoon, to the families who depended on us. We worked when we were sick and should have been at home in bed. We have all escaped to the call room to cry from the stress, the fatigue, the sadness. My aunt once told my mother, "No one could make slaves work as hard as residents do of their own free will." Training vs. CaringSo graduation recognized our educational accomplishment. In the eyes of the administration, we had finally accumulated enough knowledge of pediatrics to go out into the real world and practice as stand-alone physicians. But our contribution to the hospital community was starkly and strangely absent from our graduation ceremony. There was no recognition of the patients and families whose lives we had touched and who had changed us. There was no way to honor the intense relationships we had fostered with our coresidents. Our lives had been enmeshed in the hospital community over the previous three years. As much as I worked to preserve my personal life, I compromised on exercise, movies, weekends off, and most definitely, sleep. I lived and breathed the hospital.In addition to the public recognition of our educational accomplishments, graduation was also a venue for the hospital community to formally say good-bye to us and wish us well on our future journeys. As we walked across the stage to receive our diplomas, our residency director read a summary of our past accomplishments and announced our future plans. A few quick handshakes, and we returned to our seats. It felt as though the hospital easily severed its ties to us, but our good-bye to the hospital will be much more emotional. The TransitionPerhaps my experience is skewed because I am leaving Boston. Carlos and I are heading off on an adventure. We are moving to the Navajo Reservation in Arizona to work for the Indian Health Service. It is hard to leave our nurturing Boston community. I am used to having plenty of supervision close at hand for questions or for back-up with procedures. Now I truly will be a physician on my own. I wish I could say that I have finally become a competent and confident practitioner. But as usual, I am afraid of the transition ahead, and perhaps that makes me more nostalgic about the community I am leaving behind.When I sat down to write this last column, I struggled to find a topic that felt momentous. I have written for Focus since my first year of medical school seven years ago. I have been touched by the many readers who wrote to me or recognized me in the hospital hallways. I wouldn't be the same doctor if I hadn't had this opportunity to write and process my experiences. I am grateful to my patients and their families, the nursing staff, the physicians, my colleagues, and my readers for all they have taught me. I always thought it would feel triumphant at this moment, but it feels bittersweet. I'm ready to move on, but it's hard to say good-bye. —Ellen Rothman, HMS '98, who recently completed her residency in pediatrics at Children's Hospital in Boston
|
