HIbernation in the North

I have been enjoying a break from medicine, before the final stretch. This spring I'll be called a doctor, employed as an intern in the hospital. I'll rotate through many of the same specialties again, this time with real responsibility for patients' lives.

Many people look at internship as a kind of slavery - long hours, long nights, almost continually paged for little things by patients, nurses, staff doctors - the one who does all the grunt work, all the miles of paperwork (in my hospital we say, "saving lives, one paper at a time.") Like most things in this "career" of medical education, it shouldn't be as bad as they make it out to be.

In fact, medical education must be a cake walk compared to what it used to be. I am eternally grateful to activist feminists who have made medical school and residency a humane occupation. I won't go into details - it would be too embarassing to recount how many hours medical students used to be instructed in anatomy, for instance, and how many hours were spent in the labs, etc. compared to how much is required now... But I certainly have no complaints.