A change of pace

If you ask any medicine resident, there is no day with more potential for evil than the changeover day from one attending to the next. Residents are on for the month, but attendings cycle through every week or two, depending on where you're at. It's a dangerous day, because one attending may overtly disagree with the current plan of care on potentially all of your patients. Scary.

But the reverse is true as well: there's no day with more potential for joy than the changeover day. I had one attending that systematically discharged half the service in one day. It was nothing short of amazing.

But it's truly unfair when you're on call and it's the changeover day, because there's no excuse to follow through on a whole bunch of new, shiny plans of care. So my last call day was spent in pain: discharging, writing for meds, changing things around, ordering tests, all the while trying to cover call. Never fun. Usually, I can squeeze in 1 or 2 hours of sleep. Last time around, zero.

In eval after eval, attendings seem to think that I'm doing well, and some have said that I'm operating at a senior resident level. That's nice of them to say, but I don't feel any smarter. Maybe I've just got down that whole confidence thing down. Y'know, often, it's not a question of right or wrong, but doing what you say you're going to do. And maybe that's all that being a senior is.