Residency Blues

Starting around 4-6 months into residency, almost universally, residents everywhere get hit with the blues. It is soul sucking and demoralizing to work every day, for what feels like millions of hours, at something that you are never really that good at.

We rotate through different specialities and disciplines every few weeks to every month or two. Our advisers change daily or weekly. Just when we think we're starting to get the hang of how this guy likes to see his notes written, or how she will think about making orders, we're thrown into a brand new situation.

Actual mastery of any domain is difficult to achieve because Family Medicine residents are meant to be exposed to as much as is possible so we get little time to hone our skills before moving on.

I'm in a community based program. This means that I'm in a small hospital which is great for being the only resident on and getting more chance for exposure to cases as they come through the door. It also means I'm the only resident who understands what I'm going through. Even though there are technically 4 of us in the hospital right now, we never see each other because we are never on service together. When we do see each other in the halls there is a flood of conversation, sympathetic smiles, and general advice from our experiences with the rotation before we need to move on.

I came from a large, very close class in med school. I miss them like crazy. We would frequently run into each other in the halls of the hospital while on clinical rotation and give each other pep talks before running on. We had small groups where we could all commiserate and hug and eat chocolate. We didn't feel alone. I knew that more than 140 other med students had my back, and they knew I had theirs.

I feel alone now.

Residency can be very isolating. I love my partner dearly, but he has no idea. He has always been my cheerleader and believes that I'm a rock star no matter how badly I mess up. Other residents get that we do make mistakes and they're horrible and say things like, "Well, you still have a good outcome...", or "No no no. THIS is a terrible mistake." We work through what went wrong and try to learn from it. Residents know how the teams in hospitals work and the questions to ask such as "wasn't there a note in the chart about the patient being diabetic?" This can really help to put things in perspective.

While I love that my partner thinks that no one is smarter than me and that everything will be perfect, it's difficult to believe after being raked over the coals by a preceptor for not knowing the full differential of rash in a 2 year old. It's not that I'm not willing to explain all the ins and outs of the interactions I have at work, but most days when I need to blow up, I just don't have the energy.

The problem with residents though is that they never really have time to chat. It takes forever to set up a good time for us to actually spend time together.

I'm looking for a good solution.