An Internal Medicine Resident's Life - first 2 weeks

   As calendar turned into July, Mei just finished her intern year and became a resident! Now when she pages someone, she can use *8 instead of *6. What a big promotion! Unfortunately, the first 2 weeks aren't that smooth. Everything is not much different from the intern year, maybe a little better, just a little. She still gets yelled by consult service for inappropriate consult request and by radiologist for not knowing the case well enough. In the mean time, her peers sound so confident, laughing at radiologist, calling consult service "useless". Every night, Mei is saying to herself, "confident, confident, what can't I be more confident and stand behind my own judgement!" Overnight, a 86 yrs old gastric cancer pt spiked a fever with pulmonary infiltrate, the blood culture positive for gram negative rod. Mei started zosyn and levaquin for double-coverage of gram negative and hospital aquired pneumonia. But in the morning, when the case was presented, she was so intimidated by the attending who is very big at avoiding unnecessary use of antibotics that she did not even try to provide the reasons! What a miserable 2 weeks. Dr. K is always picking on her. He doesn't let her finish the presentation, but asks millions of random questions. When Mei talks in details about a case, he becomes impatient and starts to interrupt. When Mei skips details, he jumps out and dwells into every bit of small things. It is just plain miserable. Bad things really happen in the hospital. This 86 yrs old gentleman came to the hospital for chemo-induce diarrhea which is not entirely life-threatening. Now he caught a very bad pneumonia, is requiring O2 and dropped his BP. The family has made the DNR/DNI decision. He probably will not make out of the hospital. Elderlies are so frail, not to mention he got advanced cancer! Life and death are so close. Every moment could be the turning point! This is what Mei loves about medicine. Life is never boring, you got to have a strong mind.