Monday, October 8, 2007

Fear is the mindkiller, part 3


My slogan for internship: "I will not fear. Fear is the mindkiller"--from Dune. But there seems to be no getting around fear.

***

I've been feeling burdened lately. I had the day off on Monday, and I was at a grocery store in a wealthy neighborhood getting myself the best coffee in town. I was there because I felt that with everything I'd been through in the previous week, I deserved a treat.

A young mom wearing some outfit that a skinny person would wear to yoga (the pants were tight and stretchy, not loose and concealing) had run into someone she knew. "Oh, I'm a little stressed right now," she said. "The kids are starting sports, and they're in school now, so lots going on, it's been a little bit overwhelming."

I wanted to turn to her and say, "Are you f***ing kidding me? Seriously. You're at the gourmet store buying $20 a pound cheese and hanging out with your kids, and what you have to say for yourself is you're stressed?"

Then I reminded myself that maybe for her motherhood does count as 80+ hours a week doing a terrifyingly high-stakes job, and although I do have to say that taking kids to soccer practice and the gourmet cheese store doesn't sound THAT stressful, what do I know?

Anyway, I realized that my reaction to her was not about her. It was about my stress, and how annoyed I was that someone else would claim to be as stressed as I am. In other words, I'm starting to feel sorry for myself. It was inevitable that it would start sometime--self-pity is probably the one thing that almost all medical interns have in common at one point or another--and I now recognize that it has started.

But I have always been willing to work reasonably hard, and for long hours. And there are many things about the work that is interesting and challenging in all sorts of good ways. So it isn't the time or the work that makes me feel burdened and sorry for myself. It's the fear.

I have a low-grade fear that never really disappears, like watching a scary movie while the main characters are driving around doing something innocuous. You know something bad is going to happen, but you’re not sure what.

I make mistakes all the time. Most aren't a big deal, and the few mistakes that could have become more worrying were caught by other people. There are only one or two mistakes that can still haunt me. The worst one came very early on in internship, when I didn't recognize an acute problem as it was beginning, until it required more serious intervention than it might have if I'd recognized it earlier. No one blamed me for it. Like many intern mistakes, it was an error shared by several people. And the outcome of the patient's hospital course was unlikely to have been any different as a result.

When I came back to the incident a couple of days later in a check-in session with my attending of the time, he said, "This is why you do residency. You just have to see it often enough to recognize it. If medicine was all things you could learn in books, we could just turn you loose after medical school. You can go ahead and feel bad about it, and in fact, you should, so it won't happen again. But this is what residency is about." He said that I was right on track for where I should be in terms of my skills as a physician.

I guess I took his advice: I didn't let the mistake stop me from coming to work the next day. But remembering that morning can still clench my stomach with a special force. No matter how much I reassure myself or other people reassure me that such mistakes are part of the normal course of my development, mistakes still frighten me.

It's mostly just the most recent mistake or two I've made that I remember at any given time, though, because the main reason the more inconsequential mistakes matter is that they remind me of my potential to create harm. That clutching clenching weight inside my abdomen, the horror of the near-miss, returns even when I think about the smallest errors. It's not usually the errors themselves that make me feel that way; it's the fact that I continue to make errors.

For the first couple of months the excitement of being a doctor, and the new confidence I have as an intern that I didn’t have as a medical student, was enough to compensate for this sensation, enough to keep my energy and enthusiasm high. But recently I think that constant sense of near-miss or about-to-hit, that chronic fear, is starting to exhaust me a little bit.

I don’t want to get rid of the fear, because it makes me a better doctor as I make my lists and check them twice. But I want to figure out a way to live with the fear. I don't think it stops with internship. There are doctors I see who look totally relaxed, but they've been doctors for a long long time, and anyway, I'm not sure they should be as relaxed as they are. What's worse in a doctor than overconfidence?

In other words, fear is necessary. But it is also burdensome. More than the hours, more than the work itself, fear is what makes me feel like this is especially hard. Fear is what makes me feel secretly sorry for myself. Fear is what makes me tired and irritable; fear makes me hate some mom in a grocery store. My task for the year is not only to become a good doctor. It is learning how to live with the constant fear of being a bad doctor.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice essay. And take it easy on yourself. The YogaPantsMommy is probably just pathologically self obsessed. She needs to be stressed out and complain about her $20/lbCheese life and you need to help people. One doesn't choose to spent a life in service, whether as a doctor or a writer or a monk, a life of service chooses us. We'll find her in the dairy section and we'll find you in service.

Joe Wright said...

Thanks C. I appreciated the quotation on your recent post, too. It's a nice reminder that disabling fear is not unique to my situation. And if I spend too much time feeling sorry for myself about my fear, I risk becoming some new and more self-righteous version of the YogaPantsMommy. The really important question--implied also in an email a friend sent me privately--is whether this fear exists separately from the specific situation of internship, whether internship is just a focus onto which an older deeper fear has settled. I'm not sure how much is started by the situation, and how much existed before and has just been framed by the situation. Some of both, I think, but I don't know the balance.

--j

Anonymous said...

Regarding medical mistakes, see Osler:
"Carry a small note-book which will fit into your waistcoat pocket, and never ask a new patient a question without note-book and pencil in hand......Begin early to make a three-fold category - clear cases, doubtful cases and mistakes. And learn to play the game fair, no self-deception, no shrinking from the truth; mercy and consideration for the other man, but none for yourself, upon whom you have to keep an incessant watch. You remember Lincoln's famous mot about the impossibility of fooling all of the people all of the time. It does not hold good for the individual, who can fool himself to his heart's content all of the time. If necessary, be cruel; use the knife and the cautery to cure the intumescence and moral necrosis which you feel in the posterior parietal region...It is only by getting your cases grouped in this way that you can make any real progress in your post-collegiate education; only in this way you gain wisdom with experience."

ARP
Norfolk Island

Anonymous said...

Related to this, but please check out Grand Rounds today at http://runningahospital.blogspot.com/2007/10/grand-rounds-volume-4-number-6.html. Some moving and insightful stories about experiences in hospitals. Thanks.

Joe Wright said...

Thanks for the heads-up Paul. And AR Pito--thanks for the Osler. j