2 years!?

Has it really been that long since my last post? I've had many life changes since that last post. I don't think I'm as funny now, for one. My posts had wisdom mixed with humor and a few tears. Now I feel like I'm all serious. I feel like my career in medicine stole my happy soul from me.

I finished residency 6 months ago. What an awesome thing, to have my life back, to have money to spend, to plan my financial future, to have more free time. But I'm also much more scared about complications. In residency, it's easy to be a cowboy when you're riding on your attending's shoulders. But when you're out alone, all by yourself, making decisions feels so much more...permanent. My doctor friends warned me that in my first year of private practice, I'll have "crazy shit" happen that never happened in residency. They could not be more right. Just yesterday, I had two strange yet scary events happen that I've never seen before. I was putting an epidural in a pregnant lady and instead it went into the patient's subdural space. I couldn't do that again if I tried! It all turned out ok but it scared me and the patient, only I had to fake being calm and in control. Who wants an anxious doctor? Not me!

2 hours later I'm sitting in a c-section. All is going fine. Right before delivery, my patient told me she felt nauseated. I checked her blood pressure and it was a bit low so I gave her a regular dose of ephedrine. Baby is delivered right after. Everything is fine. All of a sudden my monitors start going nuts and I look and the EKG says my patient is in wide complex V-tach! What the hell?! I turn around and look at my patient happily watching her baby get dried off and I ask her if she's feeling ok. She told me she felt fine. I'm thinking, "how the hell could you be feeling fine?! Lady, you're in V-tach!!". I was about to tell her to cough as hard as she could when all of a sudden the V-tach resolved and never came back. Good riddance, I thought to myself. It must have been the ephedrine. It had to have been the ephedrine. But I've given ephedrine a thousand times to healthy women during c-sections! Why did she do that? See? Crazy shit happens your first year out...

My job is stressful. But I love my job. But it's stressful.