This is a "book." It contains "pages" and "words." I done wrote it.
THE END.
OK, just kidding. The truth is, I'm a huge fan of medical non-fiction, and always have been. There are five books in particular that I recommend to everyone contemplating a career in medicine, but over my lifetime I have read many, many more, and I have learned something valuable from almost all of them.
As a medical student (and subsequently as a resident), of course I loved the war stories. The medical dramas, the nightmare scenarios, the heroic saves. But what I loved even more were the stories of degradation. The stories of being awake for 48 hours at a time, overworked, underpaid, solely subsisting on meals that were nutritionally suspect, and being yelled at by the senior nurse in the ICU for sitting in "her" special chair. These stories made me laugh and filled me with empathy at the same time, and reminded me that while residency was at times hellish, it was a common hell, a hell with lots of company, and that above it all, I had a proud legacy to follow.
What I read less about in these books, however, was life outside the hospital. Was there life outside the hospital? Could there be? What about relationships? Families? How did people juggle the demand of having children with the demands of a job which mandates complete and utter devotion? And as a woman in medicine, is there a particularly treacherous balance to forge?
I don't claim to have the answers to these questions, as, two years after becoming a "real doctor," I'm still working them out, but that's what THIS WON'T HURT A BIT is about: learning, and the commonality of that experience. The experience of learning to take care of patients. The experience of learning to be a parent. Growing into both roles, and finding the equilibrium of giving what you can to two jobs that demand your all.
Diamonds are simple carbon molecules, created under high pressure. And medical residents are just ordinary people growing up and learning who they want to be under the most extraordinary of circumstances. And for all of us, sooner or later, there comes that moment to sink or swim.
These are not everyday demands that are made of us. All people make mistakes, especially those young and inexperienced in new roles, but when residents make mistakes, people can die. We worry that we may not be ready for the responsibility, and we are scared because we know that ready or not, it doesn’t matter. And all of us, one by one, step up.
We learn how to take care of our patients. We learn how to take care of each other, both in and outside of the hospital. Sometimes we fail, and sometimes unavoidable bad things happen for which we always blame ourselves. But sometimes we succeed, in small ways, and occasionally in spectacular ways. We do things we never thought we’d be able to do. We grow into our white coats. We learn how to be the doctors that our patients need for us to be, without losing the essential humanity that brought us here in the first place. And above all, we keep our eye on what’s important.
This is a "book." It contains "pages" and "words." I done wrote it.