Mile 7166: Teaching the Ropes

Above: A well deserved 7000 mile car wash.

I LOVE IT WHEN
THE TABLES ARE TURNED.

At points in the last four weeks, I've felt like I've become the intern at times.

Traditionally, every four weeks during our twelve-week rotation, we switch interns and teams to give us an idea of how rotating in a residency program feels. However, for the first switch after my first four weeks, we didn't switch teams. If we had, it might have been a mortal mistake.

Why? The caveat was that the timing of the switch matched to the time my hospital injected new interns into the 4-week rotation last month. When I say new, I mean "Just-Out-of-Match-2010" new.

Many of the interns at the hospital I am at had just simply survived a week of orientation at the hospital, and were all of a sudden thrown into the "real world." I have heard many of my friends who have gone through residency talk about the adjustment into residency and how hard it is, but here I was, along with six other medical students to see it first hand. I haven't seen as many blood shot and baggy eyes at any other point in my life than these four weeks! Some of them started to even question what they got themselves into (that was part of what I termed the post on-call syndrome.)

In some ways we knew more than the new interns.

Working four weeks at the hospital was actually four weeks more than some of the interns. Over the first four weeks, our rhythm on the wards was finally taking shape, we knew how the different rounds were scheduled, we knew where to grab the empty forms when needed, and we even knew the secret places in the hospital to get coffee. However, the most important thing that I saw during the intern switch up was how well we knew the patients on our teams; had we done the traditional team switch, that continuity of information may have been lost.

But over the last few weeks, it was odd to be teaching interns the "ropes" of the hospital. I mean, the interns knew a lot more about medicine (they finished school!), but I guess the working mindset is what we needed to teach them. The hospital world is now theirs, but now it it is time for them to make it their own. Each one of us medical students made sure that we gave the interns a framework to build on to make sure that their time at the hospital was successful. It was an odd way of learning for us students, as the last few weeks was a great lesson in learning how to teach.

Well, four weeks have passed. My intern has not only survived, but has changed since the first few days at the program; he's more comfortable with the ropes and is starting to get his rhythm with working the floors. But it's time for a new intern, and because not all the new interns for the residency IM program here have been on the floors, it's time to teach again for a second time around. It felt awesome to have been a part of my interns first four weeks in residency, and it felt awesome to be an intrinsic part of a medical team.

And here begins my last four weeks of internal medicine. I'll admit, its getting rather bittersweet.