Residency 1.12: The Purps

I'm 2 days away from finishing my month on Purple Team. More importantly, I'm 2 days away from finishing my Intern Year. This was a month of a lot of learning (thanks, Molly, for the board questions--I got all 4 right today, I can feel myself getting smarter!). It's interesting because I've pretty much been dreading the end of this month ever since March, when I found out I'd be starting second year on Owl Team. Dreading the day when I no longer had a senior over me to tell me what the right answer was. I thought I would never be ready to be the one making the final decisions. And as I near the end, surprisingly I'm pretty ready to move forward. Granted, I'm sure come July 1st, I'll probably still be like, "Um, I don't know, yesterday I was an Intern." But boy howdy, compared to the new interns, I'll have my stuff down! I think I'm finally ready to move on, to have more responsibility, more say in how things go, and less note-writing (!).

This was a really good month, full of basic pathology and really complex kids. In addition to the gen peds kids, we also were covering the renal service, and I got to see 2 kids get kidney transplants and a chance at a much more normal life--very cool! Of course, we also have the flip side--the kid who, because of a bad infection, basically has no kidney function left, and will require dialysis and likely transplant in the long term. But even that cloud has a silver lining, as we've been able to watch him slowly recover, celebrate his 8th birthday, and get back to eating tacos, which he loves. He popped in the workroom yesterday just to say "Hi!" and it totally made my day. I think he'll get to go home this week, which I don't think any of us would have even hoped for a week ago.

When I see these sick kids--the truly sick ones--get better, it is a humbling and awesome experience. For all the complaining we tend to do about ridiculous pages and long hours and the dreaded 5:55 admit, I wouldn't trade places with anyone for the world. I'm glad that at the end of the first year, I still see it that way.

Stay tuned for version 2.0...