Oct. 1, 2007

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Once Again, with Feeling

Jeff Cleary Tarayn Fairlie

I have officially become a schmuck. Somewhere between my last few days on service as a family practice resident and the second month of my pediatrics internship, I found myself smiling and even whistling sometimes while I walked around the halls of my new hospital in the middle of the night. The other evening, I walked out of the room of a whining, complaining, and difficult teenage patient and had a good chuckle over the ludicrousness of the situation with one of the floor nurses.

I’ve even been making extra time outside of work to hang out with fellow interns, which entails sending out multiple, sometimes inanely perky e-mails encouraging our group to get together and bond. To top it all off, just a few days ago I declared happily—in full hearing of most of my peers—that internship so far has been “awesome!”

In short, by changing specialties from family medicine to pediatrics, I have become the type of overly upbeat, unnaturally happy resident that I’ve derided and maligned over the past few years. The change has been great, for the most part. It is a good and reassuring feeling to be pursuing a specialty in which I believe I will always be able to grow and contribute. For me at least, it’s been like coming home after a long trip away; I’m finally somewhere that fits me, personally and professionally. And somehow along the way I’ve also lost the tonnage of ennui and sarcasm that I’d accumulated over the past year or so, which has also been liberating. I feel like a first-year med student again, ready for anything and excited about what each day might bring, an odd mix of novelty and optimism that I wasn’t prepared to experience.

It helps, of course, that pediatrics has its own special joys that could rejuvenate even the most jaded health professional; after all, sometimes providing direct patient care means singing “Ladybugs’ Picnic” to calm a distraught preschooler or rocking one of my fussy little patients whose parents aren’t there. It also helps that I’m now somewhat of a “professional intern”; after having done a year of internship, I know my job well and perhaps am able to enjoy it a bit more. But even these pluses aside, I know that switching specialty has made a fundamental change for the better in how I see my work and my impact on patient care, an unexpected but welcome benefit to the transition.

Despite my renewed sense of vocation and enjoyment of work in general, I still find that there is a lingering sense of uneasiness that comes out now and again. Having disliked my job, and even medicine itself, for more than a year, I sometimes have a hard time letting go of these negative feelings and thoroughly enjoying my current work. In the middle of a great day, I might find myself thinking about last year, when skepticism and antipathy toward my internship crept up on me and took over before I had noticed the way it affected my life at the hospital and at home. I worry sometimes that the specter of burnout will haunt my call room door again—and that this time I won’t recognize it until it’s too late. I can only hope that this uneasiness will keep me from being complacent and make me always mindful of my attitudes and sense of vocation.

—Tarayn Fairlie, HMS ’06, is an intern in pediatrics at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Mass.

The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of Harvard Medical School, its affiliated institutions, or Harvard University.

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Copyright 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College