A resident in the great state of Texas

Can across this post on a semi-famous medical insta account owned by a med school senior. I have admired her for her dedication. She is always dressed up, make-up and everything when she goes to work, posts motivation stuff about not giving up and studying etc. I did really respect her until this.

I’m sorry, what on earth??

First of all, you don’t feel sorry for those who are missing a joyous occasion? Why, cause people can only date to want to be with the it loved ones when they are dead or dying? What about your mum’s birthday, your child’s first day in school, your niece’s and nephew’s being born?? It’s not a crime to want to have a life outside of medicine. It’s also not a crime to be sad about missing things that you would enjoy.

Secondly, yes, unfortunately the truth of the matter is, most people who are “successful” have had to sacrifice everything else in life for that “success”. But that should not be the model we subscribe to or aspire to reach. We should be aiming to change the culture of all-consuming careers that leave are burnt out and hollow.

I’m sorry but I do not believe has just because we chose a career that’s demanding that we are not allowed to complain about it among ourselves. No system is perfect and our system of being over-worked and underplayed is definitely not a model we should accept and suffer in silence.

Over some stupid extra-martial fling. 

At best, what she did was stupid. Let’s think about all the stupid shit we all did when we were 19.

At worst, what Bill Clinton did to her was rape. He was in an extreme position of power over her. Calling what he did to her coercion is being lenient.

She was 19 years old. Society nearly drove a 19 year old girl to suicide because she was coerced into oral sex by a grown, married man who could have been her father. We like to talk about far away countries that kill girls who are raped and how uncivilized that is. We did the exact same thing.

She is still looked at as a joke (“he Monica Lewinsky-ed all on my gown”).

The whole second season of Slate’s Slow Burn podcast is a deep-dive into the scandal and resulting fallout. It’s really well-done and educational (especially since, for most of us, we either hadn’t been born yet or were too young to really be aware of it at the time), but I had to stop after two episodes because it was making me so incredibly angry.

The extent to which this young woman was betrayed by people she thought she could trust, abused by a system that claims to be a paragon of justice, and abandoned by a general public that was apathetic to her plight at best (and actively relishing/contributing to her abuse at worst) is, frankly, overwhelming. It broke my heart.

Instead I will be reading and thinking about Ted Bundy’s victims. I wonder where their movies are. I wonder why their names aren’t raised.

I wonder why we don’t hear about Lynda Ann Healy, a 21 year old psychology major about to graduate that semester. Lynda worked with handicapped children and got up early every day to report on the skiing conditions for local radio.

I wonder why we don’t hear about Debra Kent, a 17 year old aspiring social worker who was known for always having change to feed parking meters for strangers.

I wonder why we don’t hear about Susan Curtis. Susan was only 15 years old and was riding her bike to church that day. She was a star on her high school track team.

In a world filled with kind, beautiful people, I wonder why we all know Ted Bundy’s name. I wonder if that isn’t giving him and people like him exactly what he wanted. And frankly I’m sick of hearing people talk about him.

I’d like to talk about 12 year olds Lynette Culver and Kimberly Leach, neither of whom turned 13 because Ted Bundy stole their innocence and their lives from them. Kimberly had just been elected first runner up “Valentine Queen” by her peers and never got to wear that pretty new dress. Do you think her parents still have that dress, hanging in the back of a closet? I bet they do. I bet her dad sits with it in his darkest moments. You ever thought about him when you hear the name Ted Bundy?

Let’s talk about 19 year old Susan Rancourt, who had a 4.0 GPA. 17 year old Laura Aime. 18 year old Georgeann Hawkins. 23 year old Janice Ott. 26 year old Nancy Wilcox. 23 year old Caryn Campbell. 17 year old Melissa Smith. 19 year old Donna Manson, who was an excellent flute player and by all accounts a bit of a goth. 20 year old Kathy Parks. 22 year old Brenda Ball. 20 year old Lisa Levy. 21 year old Margaret Bowman. 25 year old Denise Oliverson, who had just gotten into a spat with her new husband and had gone for a walk to clear her mind. Denise weighed 105 pounds. She was bound, gagged, raped, mutilated and thrown from a fast moving car. Have you ever considered what HIS life has been like since that day? How many hours of his life do you think have been spent on the floor, clutching the ring he had given her, apologizing into thin air?

These stories are real. These people are REAL.

I get that Ted Bundy was handsome and his eyes were very blue but please. Please stop glamorizing him like this. He ended and ruined lives. Nothing about him is cool or worthy of emulation. Ted Bundy raped, tortured, mutilated and strangled over 30 females, including 12 year old girls. None of his victims weighed more than 115 pounds.

Ted Bundy was a pathetic man.

Emulate Lynda. Emulate Debra. Raise their names and their voices to those around you. Honor them. They were very real people with promising lives and futures stretched ahead of them, stolen.

Please don’t elevate or whitewash this kind of rampant violence against women. I assure you the world is harsh enough for us without a new generation thinking Ted Bundy is a cool, fascinating guy.

Thanks.

im sleepy

but my phone

Yes, I have several great ideas for innovative private health systems that would solve all our problems for cheap, just like you do, but these will never happen, and if we wait for people to look into them we’ll be stuck with our current system.

And the main thing I’m learning from working in medicine is that the current system is crap. There are some problems everyone’s already priced in, like how poor people can’t afford it, or like how it keeps prices high. I’m talking about other, new and unexpected forms of crappiness that I wouldn’t have predicted. Like:

- Poor people have weird issues traveling out of state. Medicaid is handled by state governments, so if you live in Nevada and take a vacation to California, and get sick while you’re in California, sometimes California just decides not to treat you because you’re on Nevada insurance and they don’t want to deal with that.

- Likewise, if a poor person wants to move from Nevada to California, there’s going to be a gap until they can jump through the hoops to get California insurance. During that gap, they will not be covered. There are things they can do to retrospectively get covered by California after they have gotten California insurance, but this is a scary gamble for some people.

- There is a constant problem where someone has a therapist/doctor they have worked with since forever who knows all of their problems inside and out and has a great relationship with them, and then they change jobs, and their new job only offers Aetna insurance and their doctor only takes Blue Cross insurance, so they’ve got to find a new doctor who doesn’t know anything about them. In the modern economy people switch jobs every couple of years, so I have patients who have never really formed a good relationships with any doctor because they know they’ll just be forced to see someone else later.

- Likewise, I have some patients who don’t want to start something important like trauma therapy or a new medication right now, because they’re afraid they’ll have to switch jobs soon and all of their treatment will end up in limbo, so they just end up getting inadequate conservative maintenance treatment forever.

- I have patients who could easily support themselves with a part time job, but who have to work full-time in order to get health insurance. I have patients who could easily support themselves off of an inheritance or something like that as long as they worked hard to budget their limited money, but who have to work full-time in order to get health insurance. I have patients who could easily support themselves with some kind of self-employment, but who have to work for a big corporation in order to get health insurance.

- The law says kids can be on their parents’ insurance until 26, which is great and a lifesaver for a lot of people. But parents don’t have to keep kids on their insurance if they don’t want to, and this gives abusive (or just overprotective) parents a huge lever with which to control their children’s lives, over and above normal financial dependence. I’ve seen this go really badly.

- I have some patients without insurance who pay out of pocket to see me once, with wildly inflated expectations of what I can do in a single visit. Then when they learn not all their problems will be solved immediately, and they freak out, because they can’t afford to see me more, and actually it was a huge financial stretch even to see me just once, and now that money has been wasted because I didn’t solve the problem they needed solved.

- Lots of my new patients come in with a story like “So I was doing great on medications, until there was an issue with my insurance, and I couldn’t get them for a few months. Well, two years and twenty hospitalizations later, here I am, sane again, and now I want to be put back on the medications that I know work for me.”

1. I may have an MD but I STILL have no idea what I’m doing.

2. I’ve found my crying spot in every rotation #blessed

3. Senior resident friends are the only means of survival

*Them: It gets better.

Me: 

4. Med students, we 100% forgot to dismiss you. Me so sorry. 

5. I write the notes. I write all the notes. I iz a typing machine. 

6. In Peds, your patient is 100% the mother. Don’t at me. 

7. I get way too much joy from saying “snitches get stitches” under my breath during lac repairs

8. Studying sucks. Studying after a 10 hour work day is nearly impossible. 

9. Wine

10. Newborn nursery. Better than birth control. 10/10 would recommend. 

11. Night shift. Aka:

12. Vacation. A time for adventure. A time to sleep. 

13. Evals. The new burn book. 

14. I no longer carry things in my pocket. Why? Because I’ve embraced the fact that I know nothing, Jon Snow #uptodateisbae

15. I’m exhausted. I’m overwhelmed. I’m stressed all the time. But I hear it gets better so I’m hanging in there. Intern year pushes you in ways you never thought possible but you’re not in this alone. So if you’ve been crying yourself to sleep, then waking up in the middle of the night panicking over the order you forgot to put in before you left, you’re not alone. I’m right there with you. 

Merry Christmas to All, and may we all stay in the fight. 

The closest I ever came to quitting my residency was in December of intern year. That was when I actually said the words “I think I need to quit” to my program director (who, bless her empathetic soul, just let me sob it out on the phone for a while, then scheduled us to meet in a couple days – by which time I had realized I wasn’t a COMPLETE idiot [just a bumbling one] and allowed her to talk me into sticking it out – thank you, Dr. O!).

And now, 15+ years later – I can barely remember what or who was the straw that almost broke my intern back. I love being a doctor (ok let’s be accurate: there are more things I love about my role as a doctor than I hate about the US health care system etc etc), and I’m so glad Dr. O changed knew my mind.

THEN ALL MY COWORKERS WERE LIKE WHAT JUST HAPPENED

Waking up in the hospital to a pager alarm