Fellow Physician Contributing Writer
Rhode Island Hospital/Brown University
Becky is currently a fellow in pediatric hematology/oncology at Hasbro Children’s Hospital/Brown University in Providence, RI. She completed her residency in pediatrics and fellowship in hospice & palliative medicine at the same institution. She received her BA and MPH from Dartmouth College and her MD from Stony Brook University School of Medicine. Her work has been published in Pediatrics, Annals of Internal Medicine, Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, and The Huffington Post, as well as on the blogs Kevin, MD and Mothers in Medicine. Her personal blog is entitled The Growth Curve (www.thegrowthc.com). She lives in Rhode Island with her husband and two sons.
I distinctly remember my drive to the hospital for the first shift of my residency five years ago. It was a night shift, a fact that only added to my trepidation. My brain bounced frantically back and forth among a random assortment of topics of which I lacked, I felt, sufficient knowledge, but which knowledge I felt sure I would imminently be called upon to use in a critical situation.
On Match Day, you are assigned to a new family for the next three to seven years. This will be the city where you might buy your first home, the city where you may meet the people who will speak at your wedding. An algorithm shuffles you into your assigned place in a new family tree.
A graphic medicine comic on wellness and lessons learned in the first year of family medicine residency.
Tommy became my patient about halfway through my PICU rotation. He arrived as a transfer from an outside hospital due to concern for liver failure, and on a morning when we already had four admissions, he became another checkbox on my to-do list.
I had such difficulty explaining to my family and friends not in medicine the concept of the match. I finally settled on a lottery-Bachelor fusion to explain it. Just replace the aspiring lovers with program directors and medical students, and roses with Match Day letters.
My early idea of what it meant to be a intern came from a combination of pop culture physician idols (i.e. ER) and a handful of actual medical experiences. A dive headfirst from a shopping cart at young age earned me my first trip to the emergency room.
Residency is hard. Anyone who tells you differently needs a stat GI consult because they’re full of it. You will be tired physically, mentally, and emotionally, regardless of what specialty you enter.
From the moment I set foot in the hospital as an intern on June 24, 2016 at 4:55 a.m. to the present as I write this reflection, my life feels as though it were playing in fast forward. It is hard to believe Match Day was almost a year ago.
March 18, 2016. I had been anticipating this day for months and I could not believe that it had finally arrived. I woke up that morning, sat on my couch, and began to journal as I do pretty much every day.
“Daddy, time to wake up! It is morning time!” I open my eyes to our four-year-old daughter at the foot of the bed smiling, her hair meticulously braided. I get up and wake her younger brother from his crib and carry him downstairs. The baby is still sleeping.
“Bunny!” my mom shouted from the foot of the steps, hurrying me out of bed the morning after my medical school graduation. She used the childhood nickname that came from my brother who was unable to pronounce “Dominic” as a toddler, a name that had stuck well into adulthood.
At this stage in our training as residents, we are at high risk for making mistakes. These mistakes can vary in range and type. It is impossible to go through residency without making an error, no matter how big or small.
Editor-in-Chief
University of Illinois at Chicago Hospital
Jarna Shah is a third year anesthesiology resident at University of Illinois at Chicago. She has been an editor with in-Training since 2012. In her free time, she bakes ridiculous desserts, practices martial arts, and writes novels every November.
