Bring it on!

In case you are curious I am nauseous, terrified and excited about starting residency in the morning. I feel entirely unprepared, which is ok because everyone does. It has been great spending these days with the other surgery interns, realizing that we are all in this together. Here are the things I am most concerned about:

• Responding to every code in the hospital (when a patient is actively dying). I am not ready to run a code. Since I'm in the ICU that should change quickly.
• Breaking bad news. I feel entirely unprepared to tell families that their loved one has died. Once again, since I am in the ICU I will get a little more rapid introduction to this difficult part of medicine. I can only hope and pray that God's love will shine through in those times.
• Being on call. I don't pull all-nighters regularly. I made it through college and the first two years of medical school with at least 4 hours of sleep every night. Even as a medical student when we were on call we typically slept a little. The one time I have truly stayed up all night in the hospital I fell asleep standing up in the OR, I cried like a baby when I misplaced a sheet of paper.... Now I need to stay up for 30+ hours and actually be mentally aware enough to make important medical decisions.
• Being on call and being paged about both medical and surgical ICU patients. I am training to be a surgeon which involves quite a bit of medicine, but the medical ICU patients are a completely different beast. Not more difficult, just different.

I can't wait to see how God more than compensates and redeems my weaknesses and shortcomings. I am beginning a 5+ year journey tomorrow that is what I have dreamed about since I was a little kid. I wish everyone could see the smirk on my face that I will inevitably have tomorrow when I introduce myself as "Dr. Qualey" for the first time.