This coming year is going to be one of great change for me. I'll be graduating in just six and a half short months. Finally, after over a decade, I'll be a "grown-up." Qualified to do what I have been called to do. I'll have to go out there and find a job. Fight with insurance companies to get paid for what I do just like every other surgeon in America. I'll have to sit for the Qualifying Exam to be a board certified surgeon. Somehow I'll have to find the confidence that has been eluding me that I am competent.
We in the medical field are used to change. We deal with it daily. We expect it. Why else would we admit someone for "serial abdominal exams"? We are ever prepared for the moment when the generalized abdominal pain turns into peritonitis and we're heading down to the operating room.
People generally don't like change. Change is scary. It requires you to alter your way of thinking. Even when people stay awake past midnight, they don't register the fact that the calendar day is different from the one in which they woke up. It's just easier to pretend it's the same day and things change while we sleep. But many of us find ourselves working past that magical moment that makes one day past and the next one present. We can't pretend; it is imperative that we change our mindset and put in the medical record that it is a new day. Sometimes, when I am exceptionally tired, I'll subconsciously fight that. Even well into the next morning, I'll put the wrong date on notes and have to scratch it out. The new day came; sometimes with me, sometimes without me. But tonight is different. Nearly all the world will be cognizant of that moment. And with that will be celebrations of change... of a new day... of a new year.
So here's to the new year. Learn what you can from last year and then let it go. Get ready for 2008 -- for the planned and the unplanned.
Cheers
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3 comments:
Sweet - I found your blog through Dr. Schwab's. For we poor souls on the other end (the neophytes) it's nice to see what that bright light may someday look like. Keep up the posts.
I found your blog through Anne. I have become a better patient from reading med student blogs. I never realized that doctors really think before they tell patients to get those tests. As a patient, I am terrified of hospitals and being told that I have to get more tests which at this time I don't know how to pay for even with 80% insurance. I hope you keep posting as you get out into the world.
Anne and Tea -- Welcome to my humble blog! Thanks for coming. :-)
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