Today was especially difficult from an imposter syndrome standpoint. All my patients got transferred or discharged today. Which may be a good thing from a patient health standpoint, but it also made me feel like I wasn’t taking care of complex enough patient, or maybe I am not being trusted with the more complex patients. This makes no sense of course, because this whole time we’ve pretty much been picking our own patients. I took on an relatively straightforward one today with the plan of taking on the first new admit. It never came. Meanwhile, my co-interns are dealing with multiple complex patients, many of whom were moving towards goals of care discussions or required extensive work ups, and working closely with the seniors and talking to families just made me feel a little less like a doctor today. Again this is all my own problem, and I feel guilty about having these selfish feelings because on the other side of this all are real people with real lives. But I think that’s also where some of these feelings come from. I feel like I’m not doing enough. But instead of wallowing in these feelings for too long, I want to use them to push me to be better. Also while I so appreciate my seniors and the fellows and the attendings being so nice and patient, I feel like a little constructive criticism, communicated tactfully, would be similarly appreciated.
Today we talk about hyponatremia — a topic that I’ve learned and been lectured on more times than I could count, and yet still get confused by. Today though our attending went over it in a way that I thought was really helpful, while also using a real world example of one of our patients. Creating frameworks rooted in physiology and in real work examples has always been really helpful for me. I’ll come back and maybe put together my own version of what we talked about to solidify my understanding.
nANIMOv 