Wow!
by Dr. David Keegan
I cannot imagine that there is any one particular year in a medical career that's as satisfying and fascinating as the first. The past year has been filled with huge numbers of surprises and little problems that had to be worked out one by one to get to today's point: one year out, still alive and still loving it.
I remember way back, while walking to the Health Sciences Centre on my first day of med school classes, when I wondered if I had actually made the worst mistake in my life (thus far) and would find myself hating medicine and all its trappings. Well, as it turned out, after that first day I had a sense of affirmation that I was where I was meant to be all along.
I was astonished that I experienced the same sort of massive contentment and affirmation just after entering clerkship and, as predicted by Dr. Craig Stone (an orthopedic resident), after being an intern with new-found autonomy. Once again, I thought there were no more experiences to come that could produce such a feeling. However, the last year has been nothing short of 12 months of delight (with a few growing pains thrown in). I had the pleasure of celebrating my first year out the other day, and it astonished me that time had gone by so fast, with so much going on during the year.
Some of the things that stand out are the pleasure and satisfaction of successfully building a practice, getting to know my patients and the surprising blood and social connections between them, and fine-tuning my clinic schedule to accommodate the various aspects of practice. These are all part of what the training was for, after all: being a doctor. And I highly recommend it.
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