Hello. This is a space I am creating to explore my own thoughts about health, healing, medical training, our medical system and what I am up to in this world. I am working as a resident in a family medicine program at an underserved hospital and I am just about to begin my 3^rd and final year.

As a new class of interns begins work, I see the same cycle from a new lens. I hated internship year, but I didn’t understand why. There must be a thousand reasons, but one is that I felt so uncomfortable all day long with the atmosphere in our workroom. And now I watch as my peers and faculty continue to perpetuate this same sick culture. I empathize with these new trainees, but I can’t fix it. I want our attitude towards them to be nurturing. I want to put attention into creating support for them as they learn the basic skills of doctoring. Instead, chaos reins and these poor interns feel helpless and trapped. The cause for these problems is hard to figure out, and hard to describe. I could attribute it to ego and insecurity, but the problems really are so many and so nuanced that I can’t sum it up neatly. That is partly what this blog is for, to create space to pick apart some of the reasons that make my residency (or perhaps medical residency in general) such a soul crusher.

I don’t know what I am doing here. I am interested in my own spiritual growth. I want to heal myself and heal my patients. I believe that plant-based nutrition, regular exercise, social support and mindfulness are the important aspects of wellness that I can address with patients. In my day-to-day work, the patients I see have such complicated problems that often include homelessness, substance abuse, traumatic relationships, and violence. Their medical visits often don’t have a clear medical complaint or a real medical solution. Of course there are the medical emergencies too, which is the technical reason for their admissions to the hospital. Congestive Heart Failure, Pneumonia, Wound infections and Sepsis, out of control Diabetes (DKA), COPD, Heart attacks etc. I am willing to order the diuretics, xrays, antibiotics, insulin, breathing treatments, blood thinners and such when they help patients. But I don’t want to spend my life in a hospital. This job is for someone else. I want to be striking closer to the root of the problem. I don’t know what that means yet.

When I have completed my training, I am hopeful I will be able to exit from this system. I have plenty of dreams, but I am avoiding “a plan.” Like so many medical trainees, I have accumulated a mountain of debt. It is growing as I make minimal payments during this residency phase. As an intern I plugged about $10K towards the debt to try to limit the relentless growth of compounding interest. As a second year, I changed strategies and put another $10K into savings for my escape route. My plan (ok, I guess there is a little one) is to create space for myself after graduation to travel and slow down. I figure I can continue making minimal payments on my loans and streamline my budget to live for 6-12 months before I need to work again. I am anticipating opportunities will come to me in that time so that I never have to sign a contract with Corporate Medicine. We’ll see!