cranquis:

doctorkintsugi:

quixoticandabsurd:

doctorofwhut:

christichris:

I 150% guarantee any medical student who posts on tumblr about how much they love medicine is a first or second year student who has never done a rotation

Ummmm…what?

Listen, I get burn out. I feel it. There are days when this is the last thing I want to do. There are days when the work isn’t worth the pay off, when the patients are ungrateful, when the disease will always win. There were days as a medical student on rotations I knew I didn’t want to go into that I didn’t want to get up in the morning. There were away rotations that were so full of homesickness and loneliness and hours that were too long that I completely felt like giving up.

But there are the good days. The days when the patients A1c drops from 14 to 7.5. Days when you extubate, days when the patient says, “doc, ya know I really appreciate you taking the time to call me. It really means a lot.” And you find your people, and you laugh and you vent and you decompress.

Medicine is hard. There’s always something you don’t know. There’s always long hours, and there’s always going to be ungrateful patients. But there’s good in this work too. And if you can’t see that this early on in your career, you’re not going to make it through. If this isn’t truly what you want to do, if you can see yourself being happy any other place, the negatives of medicine are going to feel like murder on a daily basis.

For me, personally, years 3 and 4 of medical school were better than 1 and 2, and intern year has been way better than any of that. But that’s because I like seeing patients, and every day I get closer to seeing the type of patients I want to see. If the patient interaction is something you struggle with, but otherwise still love medicine, consider that when you choose a specialty. Because maybe radiology or pathology or laboratory medicine are more likely to make you happy. But maybe they’re not. Maybe this isn’t the job for you, and that’s ok too. It’s more important to feel fulfilled in what you’re doing than to push through something you hate. People who experience burn out to the point that they can’t see the good in the world any more…they’re the physician suicide statistics. And if getting out of medicine is the reason you experience happiness, then that’s what you should do. Because personally, I want everyone to be content, no matter what course their training takes them.

Stay strong, OP. And if you need someone to talk to, there’s a whole community of us here, myself included. In the end, we all just want to help people.

I agree, it has gotten better every year. I object to a lot about the system and I don’t think training needs to be so abusive, but being a doctor is awesome.

#medblr, reframing medicine and promoting needed change.