Intern by Sandeep Jauhar

Author:Sandeep Jauhar
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374146597
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

hole

And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife And you may ask yourself—Well . . . How did I get here?

—TALKING HEADS, “ONCE IN A LIFETIME”

In biology, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. The fetal heart, through its development, reproduces the single-chambered organ of our gill-bearing ancestors. The education of a doctor similarly replays the travails of physicians of generations past. There are several reasons for this: institutional inertia; a desire for cheap labor; the punitive sensibility of senior physicians. “The brutality of the training is deliberate,” a medical school professor once told me. “It forges loyalty to the profession through shared hardship.” For me, it had done just the opposite. My spirit was broken after four months of toil and compromise. The pain in my neck was unrelenting; my right arm was starting to feel heavy. Midway through my week of night float at Memorial, I informed Dr. Wood that I was going to take a break from residency. I suspect he knew that more than just my neck needed to heal.

When I called Sonia in Washington to tell her, she started crying. She hadn’t realized how much I had been suffering. I told her the hiatus from residency was going to be temporary, though I had no idea if that was really the case. She said she’d pray for my speedy recovery.

I was given six days off and then a reduced work schedule—call every fifth night, rather than every third or fourth, and one or two mornings off per week for physical therapy. At first I was elated. Time off! A paid vacation during internship! But my initial exhilaration was quickly replaced with a brooding melancholy when I realized that I was buried again in indecision and purposelessness. Mornings were restless. I’d wake up at dawn, unable to go back to sleep. I’d get out of bed feeling cold, listless, with a queasy, sad feeling, as though my mind had been spinning its discontents in my sleep. There was a heavy weight below my sternum—the weight of a hole—extending down to the pit of my stomach. I lay on the couch, blankly watching television, staring at the window, staring at the walls. So much effort, and now where was I—the bottom of the heap? In my journal I wrote:

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