"School's out for Summer, School's out FOREVER!"

It was so awesome to hear Alice Cooper singing it on the drive home tonight. Jordan and I blared "School's Out" and loved it! Since we have finished, I have done a bit of reminiscing and looking forward as well. It was actually pretty interesting to talk with Jordan about our specific fears of residency. The thing that shocked me was that by far the scariest thing for me is not what I would have expected. So here you go, the top 5 things I am afraid of regarding residency:

5. Mean attendings/residents- This is lower on my list since I am going to Joes. If it were any other hospital the unknown aspect would probably make this jump to number one. Since I know a good chunk of the residents and attendings I am much less worried about this, but there is still the possibility.

4. Gaps in knowledge- Medicine is such a cerebral specialty with lots of tests and data and things to think through. I often find myself wondering if I have what it takes to do this. I want to be good at it, and I hope interpersonal skills are what will define me as a doctor, but there is still a fundamental base of knowledge that is so important. I am coming to realize medical school is less about teaching you the material you need to know to be a doctor and more about teaching how to think like one. Granted, it created a pretty good foundation of medical knowledge, but residency is when the real learning begins.

3. Missing Jordan- This one is pretty self explanatory. We have been talking about how we think we made such a good choice by getting married in December rather than waiting until this spring. We feel like we have created such an awesome foundation and have cherished all the time we have been able to spend together. Now we are trying to see residency as an opportunity to develop our separate lives and careers in a healthy way.  We know that spending 80 hours a week apart at work is not the healthy way, but we think it will help us appreciate each other all that much more when we do get time together.

2. Killing/harming a patient - Again, pretty self explanatory. I think if you are any new resident and you aren't afraid of this, then you are dangerous. This career path is high stakes. All of the sudden we have responsibility that can drastically affect an entire family and their lives. This is scary stuff. Medical training hierarchy will help alleviate some of this, but with each passing month and year we will have more responsibility and the stakes will be higher. Really scary stuff.

The last one seems really silly after spelling this all out, but bear with me. Trust me, it is by far what I think about the most and makes me the most scared:
1. Being tired- In addition to just enjoying sleep and feeling like my whole world is better when I'm rested, I am just plain terrified about this. I have functioned on little sleep during medical school, but I still managed to get more rest than most (especially more than the interns). I am afraid of feeling tired all the time. I am afraid of making judgment errors because I am fatigued. I am afraid of feeling down or sick just because I haven't had a good night's sleep. I am afraid of being the resident that gets in a car accident because I fell asleep at the wheel (happens all too often). I have sleep issues as it is, so to have sleep deprivation added to that, yikes! I am hoping that it ends up not nearly as bad as I'm building it up to be, but my goodness I'm scared.

Anyway, this post ended up being pretty long, but I was excited to write it down after my conversation with Jord earlier.

~vaya con dios