Two in a day?!

although I must confess both were written earlier and just finished today...

“Baby Docs” one professor calls us, alluding to the fact that we are more human than doctor still. Differentials don’t immediately pop into our head as soon as we hear the words nausea and fever, and we still identify more with the fear of the unknown the patient has than with the confidence with which the doctor pronounces the patient well after listening to breaths, heartbeats, and palpating the body.

Today, though, a classmate did a Gram stain and successfully diagnosed a patient with gonorrhea. Another milked the parotid gland, a technique we were just told about yesterday in lecture. And I examined a deep tissue MRSA-infected lesion, and recited, “Gram-positive, methicelyne resistant, staphylocci,” in my head…

So I have to say, if we are baby docs, I call us nine-month olds—still curious, getting our hands into everything, learning to walk and learning to stand up again after we fall (with a few tears in between).

I know that as years go by and we’ve seen it all over and over again it won’t all seem as exciting, and shiny, and new. But hopefully then I’ll still have this little piece of writing to remind me that we get to do things that so many other people don’t get to do, that we get intimate knowledge and immediate trust from people just because of our titles—medical student, resident, doctor. And hopefully it will humble me a little and remind me to be appreciative and find joy in the small pieces of knowledge we are privileged to have.