embarrassment

Being a med student, for me probably more than some, means being embarrassed on a daily basis. No matter how much preparation goes into the presentations we give each morning to a group of people whose knowledge, experience and doctoring you respect and feel capable of emulating in maybe your next life or the one after that, there will be questions you didn't anticipate and don't know how to answer. Sometimes I get nervous so that even when I do know things, I articulate the opposite. My classmate mentioned that her growing dependence over the years on electronic communication and the written word has made it difficult to verbalize aloud, and I found this to be an accurate description for my problem as well. Sometimes I say "stool movements" instead of "bowel movements," and mix up "antigen" and "antibody," often I find myself reaching speechless for the right phrase to introduce what I need on the phone, fully aware that the person on the other end feels the intermittent mumbles and silence.

I'm incredibly lucky because on my first rotation, on school age/adolescent pediatrics, I've had an incredibly supportive team of residents and interns who take the time to ask us questions to teach us, not to embarrass us. So I'm not complaining. Still, as students, we've been conditioned to want to be right, to answer correctly at least 91% of questions, and to know our responsibilities well. There's so much to learn that we can't go hunting for in textbooks: how to interpret strange lab results, when a patient can stop getting IV fluids, how to present a person's medications to the group, whether their drugs are being given in a dose that's therapeutic, how to page someone in the hospital and how to call someone outside the hospital, what to do when a person has two infections at once and the drugs for one is causing the other.

In the end, you're embarrassed for a few minutes, and then you go about your next task because you're a tiny part of taking care of someone and maybe the best way to do this is to be consume and absorb as much humility as possible. It's probably easy for me to be more positive about it because my team is so nice and cognizant of our learning; I imagine this will be harder on some other rotations in the hospital, so I'm trying to grill this into myself now. Some qualities go hand-in-hand for me, and this includes being observant of smaller things (which I like--even as I might be oblivious to what others think of as bigger things) and being very self-conscious (which I hate, with no qualifications). So I get embarrassed pretty easily and I lend myself to embarrassing moments (I'm clumsy, I find it hard to express myself verbally, and I take a long time to process things), but I'm learning slowly to appreciate it. The way an audience presses you to try harder stays with you long after they are gone, and the embarrassment leaves when they leave. Not to say that I enjoy it, but in some ways it is a unique opportunity to be pushed to move around enough in your skin to get over it quickly and feel the freedom to make mistakes because in the end only you live with them, the audience a distant spotlight.