One Month of Being a Doctor

As you can probably tell from my month-long absence from blogging, my first weeks of residency have kept me quite busy. After orientation I started off with Maternal-Child Health (which is just a fancy way of saying "OB & pediatrics") as my first rotation. Quite honestly, it's been such a surreal experience that thinking about it just now has perpetuated a revelation that I am actually a real-life doctor. It wasn't being in the hospital or seeing patients or anything else really that made me feel like a doctor because it's something I was so used to doing as a med student. What I think really makes it real is that I was the one making decisions for my patients. Which medications to give, which labs to order, when to discharge the patient.... all these questions were usually defaulted to the physicians I was working under, but now it's on me.

What's even more crazy is that I actually got to deliver babies! Seriously, I brought life into the world. Really, it was all the work of the amazing moms who actually had to do it. I was more or less just a glorified baby catcher. (They should design some sort of sterile catcher's mitt for doctors because those suckers are slippery when they come out.) Delivering babies is by far the most gratifying part of my job. It's one of the happiest moments in a couple's life and you're there to share the experience, and most of the time they're so grateful to you. I still tear up and get all sappy afterwards when I get to put the baby in the mom's arms for the first time.  Definitely made all the long hours worth it.

In addition to delivering healthy babies, I also got to take care of them afterwards. But with the good comes the bad, and unfortunately there were also some not so healthy babies. It's always hard taking care of sick people, but when they're tiny sick people it's even harder. Everything you do has to be that much more meticulous and you're constantly on edge, but the reward is SO much better when they finally do get better (and the majority really do get better). And then it's bittersweet when they get to finally go home.

I was really nervous starting out residency on such an intense rotation, but I'm really glad I did. There's no easy way to start residency. You just have to dive right in, not just getting your feet wet but getting soaked from head to toe. And now that I'm on a rotation where I actually have a bit of time to breathe (clinic and community medicine), I can really appreciate where I'm at right now. I'm a doctor. I'm really here, doing what I love at an amazing residency with some pretty awesome fellow residents. And even though I know the next three years are going to be pretty tough, if my first few weeks are any indication of what it's going to be like, then I have a feeling I'm going to love it.