The Intern Blues by Robert Marion

Author:Robert Marion
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2011-01-09T16:00:00+00:00

Amy

DECEMBER 1985

Sunday, December 1, 1985

This internship is really rotten. There’s nothing about it that I like. The only thing that gives me any kind of enjoyment right now is Sarah, and I can’t even really enjoy being with her because in the back of my mind I always know that I’m going to have to be back at the hospital soon. And when I’m in the hospital, I spend my time with all these nice children who have terrible things wrong with them, and I know I’m going to have to watch them get sicker and sicker for thirty-six hours at a stretch. I don’t know, I have pictures of about a half dozen of these children burned into my mind. I haven’t been able to forget the little girl I saw in the ER last week who was sexually abused; I’ve been thinking about her constantly. There’s her, that leukemic who died on Adolescent, and a couple of others.

I’ve been thinking this weekend that if I knew then what I know now, I never would have done this internship. Everything’s so hopeless; I’m so hopeless. It isn’t even half over yet, I just got back from vacation, and I’m already so tired of all of it! I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know what I can do.

Mike Miller called me into his office last week. He told me some of the people in the department were kind of upset with my attitude. Screw them! He said there were some people who thought I wasn’t taking the job seriously enough. Terrific, just terrific! I asked Mike how many of these people had to take night call every third night with a baby at home. How many of them had to neglect their responsibilities as a parent in order to work in the hospital? I told him I was doing the best I could and if he or anybody else didn’t like it, he should just fire me! He said it wasn’t him, that he understood what was going on, but that this had come up at some meeting they had had and he had been the one who was supposed to have a talk with me about it.

He also asked if I wanted to come back as a junior resident next year. He said he needed to know within a few days. I told him I’d have to think about it. After what he’d said to me I was pretty damned angry and I seriously thought of going in and telling him to go fuck himself, that I wouldn’t be coming back next year or ever again. But after I cooled off a little, I finally told him on Friday that I would be back. I don’t know. I could have taken a year or two off; Larry was encouraging me to do whatever I thought was best, and for a while, taking some time off made a lot of sense. But then, after I’d been

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