I'm a PGY-5 in general surgery, and I witnessed two striking examples of unprofessionalism yesterday, and I'm ashamed of both of them.
In the first case I overheard a pair of GIM PGY2s loudly venting about the substandard care given to a patient by a hospitalist service. Have I vented like that? Absolutely. But they came to the conclusion that they would never want to be admitted to any service other than GIM in the hospital because nobody else is a real doctor and will kill you. And they were in a very public place surrounded by other doctors and patients.
In the second case my junior for the night, a PGY1 in neurosurgery, spent 20 minutes ranting to me about how useless and meaningless his 1 month rotation of general surgery is to him…in the middle of us doing an emergency total colectomy at 2 am. I was gently probing him to see if he could find any value in working with his colleagues, or if his patients ever experienced general surgery problems, and he just couldn't fathom why he'd been put through this torture. Nevermind the patient in extremis in front of him.
I get it, stress happens, burn out is real, I'm a chief resident in general surgery, I really do get it.
Can we stop writing off and bashing entire other segments of medicine? Go punch a bag or take nap instead.
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