It is finished

So Dr J hasn't posted for a while.

What happened? Had he forgotten about his loyal readers? Had he nothing exciting to write about?

No.

He was getting hammered by the ever-increasing list of inpatients on the Gastro ward. After ballooning to almost 30 inpatients, I had little time to relax, let alone put pen to paper (or whatever it is that bloggers do). And so I sincerely apologise and will give an update for life so far.

Gastro sucked. Words really cannot convey how awful the last few eeks of work have been. My workload almost doubled, my bosses halved (away on conferences or taking days off etc etc), my number of wards quadrupled (from 2 to 8) and my average leave work time was 7pm.

On more than one occasion I came very close to just walking out the door and throwing my pager under the wheels of the nearest bus. One particular day my registrar pushed me so far that I almost cracked but lucky for him he saw the look of anger in my eyes and quickly pulled back and offered to buy lunch so I wouldn't explode.

This last week I was getting paged so often that it was stopping me from getting ANY work done and so my registrar had to go down and tell the nurses off on my behalf for harassing me so much.

I wore my heart on my sleeve and this warned those who were wise to stay away and not disturb me unless it was urgent. A few naive nurses were not so lucky and copped an abrupt phone barrage.

One day after being pushed very hard all day, I needed to go to the bathroom. However I was not even allowed the luxury of relieving myself without my pager going off 3 times in 5 minutes.
And so I stormed out of the lavatory to the nearest phone and called the number that had interrupted me.

"What's so important that you had to page me 3 times? Is it an emergency?"

[It wasn't]

"So why did you need to page me 3 times in 5 minutes? Have I ever NOT answered my page? Does the fact that I didn't answer make you think maybe I was busy? Am I still allowed to go to the bathroom?"

[Nurse on high horse starts yelling at intern down phone]

So I charged down to the ward to sort it out only to find the head nurse comforting the nurse who I had argued with and telling him to relax.

"Look ... here's the doctor now. He's oming to fix up the problem... there's no need to get angry at him.. see.. he's writing that medication up now"

I gave the greasiest glare I've ever given to them and sulked off to the other ward to complain to my intern buddies. However I later found out that that nurse has a history of being inappropriately rude and had been warned prior and was now suspended because of his alteration with me. And just to top things off, apparently he has a psych history and is off his meds.. so now I'm expecting to bump into him one late night in the carpark as he seeks his revenge. Sigh.

The last few weeks I've barely been able to make it through each day. The stress and the suffering of going to work each day made me feel sick. I didn't eat lunch at work for a whole 2 weeks cos I was 'too busy'. I was burning out and crashing fast.

And so on Friday I walked onto my ard for the last time. With a smile.

The nurses said they had never seen me so happy before. I even laughed with them. They said that I had done a great job seeing as how crap my job was. I knew that in their own disturbed way they knew something of my pain.

I did the round with my registrar for the last time and spoke my lats words to my chronic alcholic/liver patients. I recharted med charts for the last time. I did my last ward discharge summaries. I said good bye to the allied health staff and shared some celebratory Maltesers with the pharm girls.

Prof filled in my term assessment and gave me a perfect score. He took me into the endoscopy suite and offered to let me do a gastroscopy (stick a snake like camera down someone's throat into their stomach) on one of our long term patients. Nervously I declined, knowing that if I touched that scope, I'd find it too easy to get hooked and maybe even start considering physician's training.

And then at 4:45pm, Prof and my reg and I went down to the hospital cafeteria to have our final goodbye. We sat around lamenting the hospital system (and it's lack of money) whilst we sipped our hot drinks and chatted.

The finally it came. After 10 weeks of living through hell, those words came out as life giving encouragement.

"Well J, I just wanted to say, that you've done a really good job! I know it's been very hard for you becasue we've had so many patients. In fact, you've had more patients this term than the other interns had earlier this year. And we're sorry that you didn't have more registrar supervision, but you've really been amazing"

And then my aggressive tough-guy registrar nodded his head and concurred "Yeah you've had it the worst so far this year but you've done well."

And in that instant all those weeks of angst and anguish dissolved into my hot chocolate and slid down my throat out of sight. It was finished. I had run the race and survived. And finally my master was saying "Well done good and faithful servant" .

And so I walked out of the hospital that night with my head held high knowing that although very few will understand what I went through, I can be proud. Internship IS like what you see on television in shows like Scrubs. It's a rollarcoaster of exhaustion and relaxation, of pain and joy and of maturation from students into doctors.

Now all that lies between being an intern and being a resident is this little thing called the Emergency Department. That's right. Dr J heads off to play "ER" for the rest of the year and prepare to emerge from the cocoon of internship next year.