The past few months of infectious disease fellowship have been arduous. This is my new reality. I feel I’m doing all that I can to just keep afloat. I finished residency thinking “finally I can narrow down my breadth of knowledge”, but I have since realized that infectious diseases is still a very broad speciality in medicine.
I suppose now that the point of fellowship is not to learn all that there is in infectious diseases. That’s what the rest of my life is for. The point of infectious diseases fellowship is to learn the principles of how to approach an unknown and how to understand the microbiology and pharmaceuticals involved. It’s reassuring to see my attendings flip out their Sanford Guide or open Mandell to check up on something. Come to think of it, a lot of the antimicrobial agents we use are relatively new certainly not what they would have used as fellows.
I’m building up a pile of landmark/historic articles as well as newer groundbreaking journal articles that I keep promising myself I will read someday. Of course I read on the go, to answer a specific question or to read up on an unusual presentation. I read up when preparing the cases that I present to the department almost every week, but I hardly have time to read just for reading sake. For whatever reasons, ID consult teams tend to round late into the night. It’s 8 pm and we are still walking around visiting patients and having long academic discussions. Why?!
Furthermore, I only get either Saturday or Sunday off each week and that’s hardly a break. That’s not enough time to recharge because ultimately other life duties like grocery shopping, cleaning the apartment, doing laundry, cooking etc. falls on that day. Once a month, I actually get BOTH Saturday and Sunday off. I look forward to this golden weekend like a child in a candy store but it’s over before I know it. I mean to really get a break, a real break to recover from the dysthymia and irritability that has set in. A human being needs a couple of days of doing nothing – absolutely nothing – before attending to regular life issues then before returning to work. How’s that?
Anyway, I’ve survived 5 months of inpatient consult – only five?! – it seems like a lifetime. Now I’m on elective. I have spent the past weekend on the couch just lying there. Basic TV is such a bore especially on the weekend. Why the many American football games? Who cares?! I have checked email over and over again. I did go down to Providence to visit former residency colleagues and enjoy dinner together in celebration of passing the boards. That’s right, I’m now a board-certified Internal Medicine physician. Yippee!
Leave a Reply