Pocket Doodles: My First Year as a Physician, Installation #4
Neurology resident physician Nita Chen, MD journals through her first year of residency in her graphic medicine column, Pocket Doodles: My First Year as a Physician.
Columns
Peer Reviewer
University of California at Irvine
Nita Chen is an incoming neurology intern starting at University of California, Irvine. She spent her early educational years in Taiwan and thoroughly enjoyed wonderful Taiwanese food and milk tea, thus ruining her appetite for the rest of her life in the United States. Aside from her neuroscience and cognitive science majors during her undergraduate career, she holed herself up in her room writing silly fictional stories, doodling, and playing the piano. Or she could be found spazzing out like a gigantic science nerd in various laboratories. Recently, she graduated as part of the class of 2017 at Albany Medical College.
Pocket Doodles: My First Year as a Physician
Neurology resident physician Nita Chen, MD journals through her first year of residency in her graphic medicine column, Pocket Doodles: My First Year as a Physician.
February is the Hardest Month
Overwhelmed and exhausted, a resident recently came to me to ask, “Can we do something about call?” Defeat and despair had taken over his psyche. He felt unable to cope with the tasks of residency, including the seemingly never-ending demands of fielding consults, pages and patient needs. He imagined that the problem could be solved by taking less overnight call.
Competition Versus Collaboration in Residency
Now that you, the reader, have become house staff, the time has come to change your mindset from one of competition to one of collaboration with your peers. The path that leads to achieving the MD or DO degree is one of often single-minded pursuit of academic victory. The competition has been fierce.
Pocket Doodles: My First Year as a Physician, Installation #3
Neurology resident physician Nita Chen, MD journals through her first year of residency in her graphic medicine column, Pocket Doodles: My First Year as a Physician.
Doctoring When Someone You Care About is Sick
One of the trickier things to learn as a young doctor is how to navigate boundaries between patient, doctor, family and friends. Medical school teaches us that it is unethical to treat yourself or your close family due to a lack of objectivity that can affect judgement. It is fairly obvious why doing otherwise can create poor medical care due to blind spots created by subjectivity, hope, selective listening, personal agendas, and bias for a certain approach to treatment.
Toxic Stress and Consequences of Child Separation
For children who have been reunited with their parents, though, the damage may have already been done. Let’s discuss some of the key consequences associated with parental-child separation in detail, starting with the notion of toxic stress.
The Importance of Grieving in Residency
Medical training and practice exposes us simultaneously to the beauty and tragedy of life. As a resident, you are thrown into a strange world in which death will often sit as an unwanted companion in the room with you and your patient.
How to Handle the Inevitable Complaint
A page, an email, a text will request that you report to the program director’s office to have a conversation about a complaint against you. You are terrified, offended, maybe irritated. As you leave rounds to walk to the office, your adrenaline pumps.
Pocket Doodles: My First Year as a Physician, Installation #2
Neurology resident physician Nita Chen, MD journals through her first year of residency in her graphic medicine column, Pocket Doodles: My First Year as a Physician.
Pocket Doodles: My First Year as a Physician, Installation #1
Neurology resident physician Nita Chen, MD journals through her first year of residency in her graphic medicine column, Pocket Doodles: My First Year as a Physician.
Uncle and Doctor: Terms of Endearment or Old-Fashioned Barriers?
On my first day of intern year, my attending corrected me in the hallway after I introduced myself to a patient by my first name. Following this, I sheepishly adopted a habit of saying “I’m Dr. Last Name” when sticking out my hand to greet a patient. In clinic, the nurses call me “Dr. Last Name,” even when saying a casual hello. When you refer to yourself as a doctor enough times, you start to believe it.
Siloed Departments, Yet Grain From the Same Field
Early in intern year, I reached out to residents in other departments who were part of my patients’ care in the hospital. In an effort to redirect my thought patterns, I asked them how and what drives their interaction styles and their medical decisions.
Resident Physician Columnist
Duke University Medical Center
Austin is an intern in Duke’s combined Internal Medicine/Pediatrics residency program. After spending the last ten years as a student at Washington University in St. Louis (WashU), minus a one-year stint in Malawi, which he chronicled in his in-Training column, “Lessons in Lilongwe”, Austin is excited to explore a new institution for his residency training. His column provides real-time reflection on the difficulties and small victories of life as a resident and how social support systems and interpersonal connections are critical to that journey. You can follow him @drwesevich.
The Med-Peds Bunch
In light of recent press on resident burnout and depression, The Med-Peds Bunch explores the lived social support systems of a current Duke resident. Come join Austin as he begins his med-peds journey and reflects on feelings of family in residency.
