3rd Year in the Can

It's over. 3rd year. It kinda sucked as a whole: you're the lowest on the food-chain, you don't get respect from patients, residents, attendings, or even nurses and NPs. Did I mention that I fucking hate mid-levels? Anyway...reasons why 3rd year sucks:

-You show up as long as any resident, so depending on the rotation, this can be well into the 60s and 70s of hours. I know of several colleagues who had topped out over 80, and then were bitched at by their surgery attendings for complaining that they went over. The thing is that you are not paid, since of course, you are in school. So you get to sit around idle for hours watching everyone around you scurry and get work done, at least getting the money made, while you spiral into debt. An investment for the future? Of course? Tough at times? Yeah.

-No respect: noone respects you, and why should they? You're there to learn, and many patients are reasonable to understand that they are contributing to honing the mind of a future doc, but many people are just frustrated with the extra time it takes to deal with us and the way we can never answer questions or always have to defer thigns to our higher-ups.

-Scutted out. You get all this shit work dumped on you. On one of my surgery rotations, the PA dumped all the services' discharges on me every afternoon. Monotonous hand-written orders for the patients, and this was a busy service, too. What's the utility in this? Where's the education? I guess the argument can be made that we will be residents soon, and that doing anything they do has some educational value. But when you're there, in the hospital, tired because you got up at 4:15am that morning, and terrified of the end-of-rotation exam, you really want to just learn useful information and not be sent on endless missions of scut work.

I'll go over all of my specific rotations in the next posts. Believe me, I could write an entire book on any one rotation.