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  A DOCTOR’S INITIATION

  SANDEEP JAUHAR

  FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX • NEW YORK

  FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX

  18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

  Copyright © 2008 by Sandeep Jauhar

  All rights reserved

  Distributed in Canada by Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.

  Printed in the United States of America

  First edition, 2008

  Portions of this book originally appeared in different form in The New York Times, The New England Journal of Medicine, and The Lancet.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jauhar, Sandeep, 1968–

  Intern : a doctor’s initiation / Sandeep Jauhar.— 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 13: 978-0-374-14659-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-374-14659-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  1. Jauhar, Sandeep, 1968– 2. Medical students—United States—Biography. 3. Interns (Medicine)—United States—Biography. 4. Residents (Medicine)— United States—Biography. I. Title.

  [DNLM: 1. Jauhar, Sandeep, 1968– 2. Physicians—Personal Narratives. 3. Internship and Residency—Personal Narratives. WZ 100 J4095 2008]

  R154.J39 A3 2008

  610.92—dc22

  [B]

  2007009161

  Designed by Gretchen Achilles

  www.fsgbooks.com

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  This is a work of nonfiction. The author has changed the names and identifying characteristics of most people. Dialogue is recounted from the author’s memory.

  FOR SONIA, RAJIV, AND DAD

  BUT MOST OF ALL, FOR MOHAN—ALWAYS, ALWAYS

  contents

  Prologue: Captive

  Internship: An Introduction

  I. SWITCHING HORSES

  1. Escape

  2. Phase Transition

  3. Medical School

  4. Bogus Doctor

  5. On Call

  6. Road Trip

  7. First Death

  8. Heart Rhythms

  9. Customer Service

  10. Falling Down

  11. Psychotherapy

  II. CRACKING UP

  12. Night Float

  13. Hole

  14. Winter Blues

  III. RECONCILIATION

  15. Difficult Patients

  16. Pride and Prejudice

  17. Informed Consent

  18. Bloody Penguins

  19. Code Leader

  20. Gentle Surprises

  21. Fellowship

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  prologue: captive

  The cardiac monitors are whistling like blowpipes and the ventilators are playing the kazoo. I pull open a sliding glass door and close it behind me. In the dark, I can barely make out the patient’s face. It is delicate, wrinkled, almost peaceful. The ventilator that has sustained her for nine days sits unplugged in a corner, next to a small aluminum sink and a pullout toilet. Clear plastic bags of medicated fluids are hanging on a metal pole next to her bed. On the wall is a cheap print of a coastal village with yachts floating on azure blue water. I gaze at it for a moment. Right now, at four o’clock in the morning, it seems impossibly far away.

  The data from the monitor swirl in my head like a maelstrom. I’m not sure what it all means, but I do know that right now the patient’s blood pressure is normal and her heartbeat is a regular picket fence. I sigh, relieved. Nothing more for me to do tonight.

  Then she opens her eyes. “Welcome, Doctor. Will you have a drink?” She points in the dark toward the fully stocked bar. “You know where everything is. And fix me one as well.”

  I ask her where she is. “My apartment,” she replies, bewildered. She seems to know nothing about being sick or in the hospital.

  I stare at her quietly. “It’s too much trouble for these people,” she says.

  “Which people?” I ask.

  “The people . . . People . . . It’s too much trouble.”

  I assume she means the nursing staff. “Are they coming into your room?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” she replies. “Coming here, coming there . . . coming anyplace.”

  The monster has come back. Only hours earlier it took up residence in Mr. Schilling down the hall. I found him sitting at the side of his bed, his sheets soaked with blood. “Get me out of here!” he roared. “You’re keeping me here against my will.” The head of his penis was lacerated. A nurse explained that he had pulled out his catheter.

  “You can’t keep me here! I don’t belong in jail.” Earlier he had spoken to me quite normally of his grandchildren and his country club. Now he was a raving lunatic.

  “I am a doctor!” I shouted, grabbing the lapels of my white coat. “This is a hospital, not a jail!”

  “It is a jail,” he cried, “and you are the warden!”

  I ordered him sedated, and though I was confident that he would soon be his normal self again, I stopped outside his room to ponder what Dr. Carmen had told us residents that morning. “Get this patient out of the unit as soon as possible,” he warned. “People like him don’t do well here.”

  No one could ever say what exactly caused the monster to appear, but something about the environment of the intensive care unit makes some people lose their minds. Perhaps it is sensory deprivation—being kept in a windowless room, away from family and familiar things. Or perhaps it is the sensory overload—being tethered to noisy machines running all day and night. Perhaps it is sleep deprivation or pain. I had read about brainwashing experiments on American POWs: in environments of intense isolation and immobility, they often experienced psychotic reactions. But that was the jungles of Southeast Asia. This is a respected hospital on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

  “I wish I could be a better host, but I’ve been under the weather,” my patient explains, and I nod cautiously. For a moment I wonder whether perhaps I am the one who is hallucinating. Maybe she is sitting in her living room. Maybe I am about to pour her a drink.

  “You’ve been sick, but you’re getting better now,” I tell her, hoping to jog her memory.

  She looks through me. Even in the gray light, her eyes appear bloodshot. “Yes, Doctor,” she says. “Now please fix me that drink.”

  I squeeze the bag of saline hanging next to the bed. “Thank you,” she says sweetly, and then goes off to sleep.

  I head back to the conference room. Through a window the moonlight is shimmering off the East River. A barge floats by, loaded with crates. The steady current provides comfort, especially now, the nether time, when it is too late to go to sleep and too early to be awake.

  The door to the conference room closes behind me like a trapdoor. I dim the lights; in the middle of the night, bright lights are almost unbearable. I gaze at the grid on the whiteboard. Twenty beds, eighteen patients, a nearly full unit. Scribbled in each square is a list of scut work. Still so many tasks to finish. Still so much to do before morning rounds.

  I can hear the alarms behind the door. Some are low-pitched, like the sounds a head submerged underwater would make: glug, glug, glug. Others are high-frequency chimes. Sometimes they ring out of sync, like dueling banjos. Out of the din I hear the Berkeley Campanile announcing the turning of the hour. It is a sound from a different time, a different place. I am surprised that I still remember it.

  I start running around the conference table, hopping up and down, shadowboxing. My fists are furiously pumping up and down as I fling away the tension that has accumulated over the past few weeks here. I am running, running—now sprinting. My legs seem to possess a spirit of their own. I am back on the Fire Trail, racing
around the reservoir, punishing my calves on the steep, crevasse-ridden hills. Now I am slipping on the polished tile floor, punching stiffly at the air while “Sympathy for the Devil” plays in my head. I am running, running, trying to escape: the patients, the monster, this hospital, this life. Perhaps Mr. Schilling was right. Perhaps this is a prison. Perhaps we are all being kept here against our wills.

  I don’t know how much more of this I can take.

  internship: an introduction

  The education of a doctor which goes on after he has his degree is, after all, the most important part of his education.

  —JOHN SHAW BILLINGS, THE BOSTON MEDICAL AND SURGICAL JOURNAL, 1894

  Every profession has an apprenticeship, and the apprenticeship in medicine is called residency. The first year of residency is known as internship, when new medical school graduates rotate through different hospital settings—outpatient clinic, intensive care unit, cancer ward—to learn how to treat patients and see how medicine really works. This introduction to the profession is a legendarily brutal year, for many doctors the most trying of their professional lives. Working eighty or more hours per week and staying up every fourth night or so on call, most spend it in a state of perpetual exhaustion, as near ascetics with regard to family, friends, food, sex, and other pleasures. The intensity of the training has inspired a kind of awe among medical students, perhaps not unlike that of minor league baseball players waiting for their chance to go to the majors. Medical school is the farm team; internship is the show.

  I was an intern a decade ago now, but I still remember it the way soldiers remember war. After our son Mohan was born, my wife, Sonia, also a doctor, referred to the newborn period as a kind of internship, and it definitely wasn’t easy, staying up night after night. But taking care of a newborn was very different from internship. In internship, when you were awakened in the middle of the night you had to be prepared to deal with almost anything—and in the worst possible state, too. It didn’t matter if you felt like you were going to drop. You still had to be at the top of your game.

  After the internship year, a doctor can work as a general practitioner, but the skill set that has been acquired is so limited that most people go ahead and finish residency—several more years of training, depending on the clinical specialty—to become full-fledged physicians. In my field, internal medicine, which has a three-year residency, second-year (or junior) residents supervise interns. Third-year (senior) residents supervise interns and junior residents. Together, interns and residents constitute the hospital (or “house”) staff. After finishing residency, many physicians elect to do a fellowship: one to four (or more) years of training, depending on the field, to further specialize. By the time they get to the senior level, that of attending physician, many doctors are already in their mid-thirties.

  This book is about my residency at a prominent teaching hospital in New York City. The story goes up to the point when I decided to pursue a fellowship in cardiology, my specialty, and thus covers the most formative period of my education as a doctor. For me it was a disillusioning time; I spent much of it in a state of crisis and doubt. I had trained as a physicist before entering medical school, and ten years of uncertainty about my choice of a profession came out all at once. In his path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics, Richard Feynman hypothesized that when a particle travels from point A to point B, it traverses many different paths to arrive at its destination. This certainly seemed to apply to my journey into medicine. Because I had lived another, more sedate, professional life, the one I had to endure in the hospital was even more difficult to bear.

  My goal in writing this book is to give others a sense of that confusing, tumultuous time, my initiation into the guild of which I am now a proud member. My hope is that readers, on their own journeys—many of them in the medical profession—will draw lessons and perhaps even inspiration from my experiences. The experiences will be especially relevant, I think, to medical students preparing to make their own forays into the hospital. Laymen often view doctors as Type A overachievers with little self-doubt. I hope this book will serve to dispel that myth.

  Everything that appears on these pages actually happened to me. However, most names and identifying details have been changed to preserve confidentiality; in some places, time has been compressed or the order of events has been changed for the sake of narrative cohesion; and in rare cases I have used composite sketches to better represent my experience. I write only of my own experiences, but I am sure that most residents have undergone similar ones. Doctors’ professional lives are built brick by brick, case by case, but the foundation, residency, is much the same.

  Not long ago, when I was interviewing a student for a residency spot at the hospital where I now work, the applicant said, “Perhaps the easiest decision a doctor can make is to become one.” I must have frowned, for that definitely had not been the case for me. I was a reluctant traveler when I started on my journey into medicine, and this ambivalence surely affected how I coped with it. For much of internship I felt buried—in a waking hell under the weight of my own (and others’) expectations. Only when I learned to accept my limitations—and the workings of the strange new culture I found myself in—was I able to start digging my way out and emerge a less conflicted physician, if not exactly doubt-free.

  Thankfully, I am finished with my apprenticeship, and I can say with pride that I made it. I now work as a cardiologist at a large teaching hospital on Long Island. Some days it feels strange being an attending physician, and other days so perfectly reasonable, like it was preordained. For the most part, I am happy. I enjoy my job, taking care of critically ill patients with heart failure. But so much about medicine still troubles me; sometimes I still want to muddle through things; sometimes I’m still not sure cardiology was the right choice. At one time I didn’t know how to read a chest X-ray. I worried about being a code leader. I wasn’t sure if I even believed in critical care. Now I make my living practicing it. It isn’t something I ever expected I’d be able to do, and yet now I am doing it. I have made the leap. But I will never forget the journey.

  PART I

  switching horses

  CHAPTER ONE

  escape

  There is no short cut, nor “royal road,” to the attainment of medical knowledge. The path which we have to pursue is long, difficult, and unsafe.

  —JOHN ABERNETHY, ENGLISH SURGEON, HUNTERIAN ORATION, 1819

  I had been an intern less than an hour, and already I was running late. The sloping footpath leading up to the hospital was paved with gray cobblestones. My feet ached as my oversize leather sandals slipped on the rounded irregular rocks. The hospital was an old building browned by the passage of two centuries, with spidery cracks in its façade. Founded in 1771, New York Hospital is the second-oldest hospital in the United States, a mecca for doctors and patients from all over the world. I had been in the building once before, six months ago, for a residency interview. I spun through a revolving brass door, nearly running into the burly security guard reading the New York Post. He looked up from the tabloid just long enough to point me in the direction of the elevator.

  The tiled corridors were dark and dull, mixing shadow and light. I darted past the chapel, past the café, around the information desk, which sat in the middle of the huge atrium like a fort, and entered a bank of elevators. Hanging on a wall was a portrait of a gray-haired lady in a blue dress sitting in dignified repose before an open book. She was a graduate of the medical school, class of 1899, ninety-nine years ago, who built a medical college for women in Northern India, on the banks of the Ganges, near where my father had his early college education. Nearby was a metal tablet in bas-relief: “She cared for all in need. For each, she made time to guide, to teach, and to heal.”

  When I arrived on the fourth floor, other interns were still filing into the auditorium. A woman handed me a manila folder, and I went inside and sat down. The orientation packet contained several essential documents:
a house-staff phone card, directions for obtaining autopsies, instructions on how to use the hospital dictation system, and the residency contract. I leafed through it quickly. My salary was going to be $37,000 a year, about eight dollars an hour, I calculated, given the number of hours I was going to be working, but I didn’t mind. Though I was a year shy of thirty, it was more than double what I had ever made.

  My classmates, though younger than I, appeared older than I expected, casually dressed, all thirty-five of them, in khakis and polo shirts, faded jeans and sequined tops. Some of them evidently knew each other, because they were already chatting in small, insulated groups. They were from some of the best medical schools in the country: Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Columbia. Though I too had gone to a top school—Washington University in St. Louis—I had been feeling insecure about the prospect of working with them. For months I had feverishly been reading Harrison’s tome on internal medicine and review articles in The New England Journal of Medicine to prepare for this day.

  Someone in the front row stood up and turned to face us. It was Shelby Wood, the hospital’s residency director. He was a serious-looking man of medium build, with straight brown hair and a long, aquiline nose. He was wearing a white coat and a fat blue tie that might have been in fashion twenty years earlier. My elder brother, Rajiv, a cardiology fellow at the hospital, six years ahead of me in his medical training (though only two and a half years older), had warned me that Dr. Wood was a bit of a grouch, but had added that he was also fair and decent and a strong advocate for his house staff. Wood, I was to learn, hailed from the old school, where you were expected to live and breathe medicine, stay late in the hospital, neglect your family for the sake of your patients, and emerge on the other side a seasoned physician.