How horrible is it being an intern/resident?

Question

It is my dream to be a doctor.
I know being an intern and resident is going to be hard.
I'm not too worried about the lack of sleep and working a lot of hours.
But I am worried about how I will be treated.
Like on Grey's Anatomy, they treat the interns really bad.
I don't know how accurate that is because its fiction.
But it kinda seems conusing to be an intern. Like it seems as if the interns don't know where to go or what they should be doing.
Can someone tell me if my assumptions are right?

Answer 1

The way things typically work during rounds, is that the attending starts asking questions of the least trained person first, may be a medical student. If they don't know, it goes up the line until somebody gets it right. As an intern, you don't know much, so you end up feeling like an idiot a lot. (Unless you happened to read about Mrs. Smith's gallstone pancreatitis right before you get asked about it!)

If you keep up with all your patients, read as much as you can, and do everything you're supposed to do, you'll get through it just fine.

I hated internship because it wasn't in my specialty (anesthesiologists have to do a year of something else first). I did infernal medicine (no, that is not a typo) and I'd rather poke myself in the eye with a fork than be an internist (all talk and no action). I got through it, and I learned a lot, and was very happy to move on to anesthesia.

Residency was a lot of work, but in my hospital, we were treated fairly well within our department. Our attendings were never nasty, and we got a lot of one-on-one teaching.

I felt bad for my surgical colleagues, who WERE treated poorly - degraded, yelled at, etc. The surgeons could be mean to us too, but they had to watch it because we had the power to delay and cancel cases :)

I think it is better now, with the restrictions on how much you can work. Those 35 hour days are killers!

Answer 2

Now that residents are guaranteed sleep and rest periods, you'll find the training intellectually stimulating, and it won't really matter how you're treated. The fact is that even with doctorate in hand, you don't know diddly about medicine at that point. Some of your attendings will really enjoy teaching. Others will be busy, and teaching sometimes looks like an impediment to patient care even to people in academic practice. When you're a tired and sleepless intern, you'll be able to sympathize with an older, tired, and sleep-deprived attending, so you take a certain amount of maltreatment as a matter of course. Of course, you'll run into the occasional jerk, but that's true in any walk of life, and in residency you have the solace of knowing you'll only have to put up with any particular jerk for a month's rotation as a general rule, or at worst for a few years until you finish your training. Plus, dealing with them is good training, too: you'll have a lot of patients who are worse, and you'll have to deal with them forever.

Answer 3

definatley be burned. Think of the Salem Witch Trials. Those women were burned at the stake. Can you imagine listening to someone scream bloody murder as they were being murdered. I sappose that is probably what it is like when you are cremated like being in a giant oven, but lets face it the dead person can't actually feal it. On the other hand being drowned would also be pretty scary. But you can't drown your self so it would also have to be murder. Having someone hold you down under the water as you struggle to find air, like you are trapped and there is no escape is terrifying. But, i still think Burning would be far worse than drowning.

Answer 4

It's this easy: Don't go "all doctor" on the hospital staff (ESPECIALLY THE NURSES, who can make or break you if they want). Be confident, but keep your ego in check.
You will have plenty of occasions to succeed and fail.
Learn and grow.

Answer 5

An internship is very interesting and enjoyable period. We learned a lot . We had round the clock duties , but it`s part of training.