— My internship year — July 1981 to June 1982 —
My internship year, June 1981 to June 1982, was the most difficult year of my life to date. I served an internship in Internal Medicine at the University of Utah Hospital, Veterans’ Administration Hospital, and LDS Hospital. I spent 8 of my 12 months at the Veterans’ Hospital. I went to work every day of those 365 days, and most days were 10 to 12 hour days. I was on call every 4th night, which meant receiving new patients and taking care of the other interns’ patients all night long. I was in a state of exhaustion and sleep deprivation most of the year. We averaged 80 hours of work per week, and I calculated that I earned approximately $3 per hour for the year. This was, however, the first time in my life that I had received a significant salary, and that was enjoyable. Susan was very supportive, despite the many hours that she spent alone. I didn’t attend one priesthood meeting the entire year because our rounds on Sunday mornings never ended before 11 am. As interns, we had much more responsibility than as medical students.
My internship provided me with many unique and interesting situations, to say the least. I spent a month in the Emergency room at the University of Utah Medical Center during October of 1981, and during that month I participated in a cardiac arrest on a 300-pound woman, saw a hobo who had fallen off a train and hadn’t had a bowel movement or a bath for 11 days, worked up a 19-year old obnoxious pregnant girl who didn’t want to have her illegitimate baby in Utah because she had heard that “Mormon doctors killed girls on the operating table if they found out they were —– (profanity)”, saw a wayward girl who claimed that she had passed a bone out her vagina during her last period, and helped calm down a mother who brought her 17-year old son into the Emergency Room screaming “My son has been drugged!”, with a subsequent work-up revealing a blood alcohol level of .20 in her son. My most memorable experience during that month, however, was dealing with a teenage girl who overdosed on her antidepressant medication. She was conscious but somewhat delirious when she arrived at the Emergency Room. As I was doing my initial physical examination on her, she kept telling me how ugly I was and how big my nose was. She was quite abusive and combative. I smiled through all the verbal abuse as I thought about what was soon coming her way. Standard protocol on overdose patients was to insert a large-bore gastric lavage tube through the patient’s nose, down into the stomach, and then to use that tube to evacuate the stomach’s contents with suction. I need not mention how unpleasant this was for the patient if he or she was conscious. The smirk left the girl’s face as she saw me lubricating the huge tube that I was about to ram down her right nostril. I am glad that I didn’t run across this girl in public during the months that followed. Those were the days.
During my internship, I saw first-hand the devastating effects of alcohol and tobacco over and over again at the Veterans’ Hospital, with chronic bronchitis, emphysema, cirrhosis, and esophageal varices leading the list. My two most difficult months were the two that I spent in the Coronary Care Unit at the Veterans’ Hospital. My supervising physician was as demanding as the work schedule. My senior resident and I were on call every other night for those 2 months. My month at LDS Hospital (February 1982) about did me in. On February 1st, I inherited 18 patients from the preceding intern, and I was also on call that first night, receiving an additional 13 new patients. It was a great month for learning, but sleep was a rare luxury. During that year, I applied to and was accepted into the anesthesiology residency program at Kansas University Medical School in Kansas City, Kansas. The day in June 1982 when I made my last rounds at the Veterans’ Hospital, checked out my patients to a brand new intern, and walked out the front door of that hospital was the happiest day of my life (except my marriage day).
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