Now that the people who inspired this have had a few weeks to get paged at all hours, to get fussed at for things that may or may not be important, and to have it reinforced that they have plenty to learn, I hope that my timing will be right.
Chances are good that during your first three weeks of internship you've made a mistake; it's likely, in fact, that you've made more than one mistake. If you're lucky they've been things that haven't affected a patient's clinical course; someone has been watching over your shoulder (guardian angel, experienced nurse, senior resident, NP or PA, attending physician) and they've guided you to make a different choice before the one you wanted to make marched towards an unfortunate conclusion. Because you are "just" the intern, the odds of having made a Really Big Mistake that causes harm to a patient are quite small. What I do hope is that from each of your smaller mistakes is that you have owned them and that you have learned something. I also hope that they've kept you humble- not in the sense of wanting you to go home and self-flagellate about them, but in the sense of helping you to remember that internship and residency are a process, that they last years for a reason, and while you don't know everything now...well, Hell, I've been out of med school for 12 years now and I still don't know everything. Scratch that last bit because you're never going to know everything. Part of residency is learning to accept that bit of uncertainty.
I'm going to give you the bad news about mistakes, and if you're not in medicine and you think the practice of medicine can be perfected, you may want to stop reading now. Interns, residents, physicians.....you're going to make mistakes in your career. You are going to make at least one mistake that is going to harm a patient. Hopefully that mistake (or those mistakes) will be things that will be recognizable and correctable before they do irrevocable harm. Hopefully those little mistakes will have taught you the humility to admit that you made a mistake (this includes telling the family and the patient...they deserve to know) and will have taught you how to learn from experience and not to make the same mistake again. Hopefully you will have the strength and the integrity to admit that things could have been done differently, should have been done better, and will not be done in the same way again.
So go. Learn. Love your job. Be kind to your patients. Admit your weaknesses. Celebrate your successes. Most importantly, remain humble with these two quotes from Ambroise Pare:
"I dressed him, God healed him."
"Cure occasionally, relieve often, console always."
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Now playing: Radney Foster - Half Of My Mistakes
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