Intern year starts and you’re feeling pretty good. Those well-deserved two letters finally appear after your name, people are looking up to you, and the reflection in the mirror of you in that long white coat is looking kind of fly. Then reality hits and you realize you’re actually not the rockstar you thought you were. Here are 8 humbling moments that every intern will experience. 1. Your med student outshines you Sure he only has two patients and doesn’t have to write H&Ps or put in orders, but Patrick Med Student knows way more about those two patients you share and routinely (inadvertently?) embarrasses you on rounds with the lab results and family history you had no idea even existed. 2. The nurses know way more than you do You might actually come up with the right medication to order for your patient, but have no idea what dose to give. Is 50 mcg of Fentanyl good? How about 100? Luckily, your friendly ICU nurse has been taking care of Mr. Johnson for the past few days and tells you what to put into the computer. Phew. Saved again. 3. You show up to a code and have no idea what to do It’s chaos. You’re not sure who’s keeping time, the nurses are frantically running around looking for supplies, the resident in charge is trying to figure out the components of the code line, and you can’t actually even visualize the patient to see what’s going on. There seems to be 20 people at every code, many of whom have MD or DO in their title, but most of them are just overcrowding the doorway and just preventing more knowledgeable people from entering/exiting the room. 4. You wake up your senior for “an emergency” and feel like a total idiot when she finds your patient in no acute distress As you’re examining your new COPD patient, he seems to be decompensating and not getting much relief from his oxygen mask, but after rushing to get your senior resident/fellow/attending, you both arrive to find Mr. Davis comfortably eating a bag of chips. Seriously? You swear he was just crashing. 5. Your patient’s nurse pages you 911 and you have no freaking idea what to do You arrive in the middle of the night to find your patient tachycardic, hypertensive, tachypneic, and agitated, only to find the same thing happening to yourself as your brain is enveloped by a misty fog. Your senior resident calmly walks over and orders that PRN Fentanyl you forgot to put in earlier and your patient calmly falls back asleep. 6. A patient asks you where the cath lab/radiology suites/cancer center is since clearly, a person wearing a doctor badge and white coat should know, except you just blush and point him to the information desk. Yeah, you have no idea where anything is. You still take the long way to get from the parking garage to the ambulatory clinic and every few days, you find a secret passageway in the hospital you had no idea even existed. 7. Your attending asks you a simple question and you become aphasic Maybe you know the answer, somewhere deep within the crypts of your temporal lobes, and maybe you never actually understood acid/base physiology to have a clue, but you get asked to interpret a blood gas on rounds, and you suddenly find yourself unable to speak. Not even a word. Just keep staring blankly until your med student answers for you. 8. You think to yourself, “I just can’t do this”. It’s just one of those days where you seem to be making mistake after mistake, ordering a chest CT on the wrong person or accidentally giving your delirious, itchy octogenarian some Benadryl, and it feels as though you will never be where your seniors or attendings are in knowledge or poise. All you want to do is talk to your best friend, but she’s 2 H&Ps behind on the CCU and has no time to grab lunch with you. Actually, this day happens all the time. But don’t despair; every intern goes through these moments and things will get better. At least that’s what they tell me. Source
