Title: Intern: A Doctor's InitiationAuthor: Sandeep Jauhar
I'll admit that I'm curious about the lives of the doctors who care for me and my family. How many kids do they have? Where do they go on vacation? Are they happy? But if they're not happy, do I really want to know? In Intern, Sandeep Jauhar describes the crisis he went through during his intern year (the first year after medical school-- a hellish, hazing sort of year when doctors are on call every third or fourth night and work LONG hours the other days). It's an interesting, well-written book, filled with stories about what Jauhar learned from his patients (not all that unlike Atul Gawande's writing about his residency experience). The main difference is that Jauhar didn't really know what he wanted from his life, constantly saw the grass as greener on the other side of the fence, and always second-guessed his decision to go into medicine (he started medical school after finishing a PhD in physics). In other words, he was a big whiner.
I haven't been an intern myself, but I feel like I have a pretty good understanding of what interns go through. And after reading about Jauhar's experience, I feel exceptionally lucky that I was married to an intern who loved what he was doing, who came home from 36-hour shifts to shovel our driveway, who listened with a sympathetic ear when I talked about staying up all night with a baby and a toddler. I look back on Eddie's intern year as the hardest of our lives as parents and one of his hardest as a physician, but I think that if Eddie wrote a book about the experience, it wouldn't have been as whiny or angsty.
2 comments:
I read this recently too. Amusingly enough, Sandeep was a classmate of Allen's at WUSTL. You'll see his science writing regularly in the NYT.
makes me wonder if i should read this book or not.
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