Internal Medicine: A Doctor's Stories

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THIS BOOK IS THE STORY OF A RESIDENCY IN internal medicine. I wrote it over a period of ten years, beginning just after my own residency ended. The chapters appear here in an order that follows the trajectory of residency, from the first night on call to another call night some forty months later, by which time the narrator, no longer a resident, is out on his own, practicing as a hospitalist in a small town in the Midwest. I wrote this book primarily in an attempt to make sense of the process of becoming a doctor.

I first realized how much I wanted to tell this story on a day in March of my intern year, sometime between three and four in the afternoon. I’m at a nursing station, where three medical teams — each with its resident, interns, attending physician, medical students — and two or three consult teams of similar size and composition, along with nurses, CNAs, physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech therapists, the chaplains, transport workers, dieticians, social workers, case managers, maintenance workers, and probably others I’ve forgotten are all busy with the different things they do. Everyone is talking at once. At any given moment, two or three of them are trying to talk to me.

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