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This story is from the Anamnesis episode called Got Your Back and starts at 25:34 on the podcast. It's by Ronil Shah, MD, a PGY3 in the University of Colorado psychiatry program.
In the first week of residency, I'm on the inpatient psychiatric unit at the local hospital we rotate at. I'm a completely green intern, very jittery. I have really no idea what I'm doing. I'm sitting in front of the computer really bouncing questions off the residents that are a year older than me.
The chief resident is very helpful and it just so happens that particular day is my first day with this attending who's the director of the inpatient unit and who has this reputation not necessarily for being mean, but for lack of a better way to put it, of being a badass.
This lady, she's tall, wears heels, kind of walks with this characteristic click-clack of her shoes and just has swagger. She's extremely intelligent, very competent, very fast, and good at what she does. This is the sort of woman who does twice the amount of work in half the time that most other attendings do.
It just so happens I'm going to be working with her for an entire month. Naturally, I'm just terrified before she even shows up. I've heard a lot of things.
In fact, she actually interviewed me when I was interviewing for the residency program. I remember my interview with her being the most difficult one that I had the entire residency interviewing process. Throughout the entire circuit, I remember being very rattled by her interview.
Fortunately, things worked out and I still matched with this program, so you can understand my trepidation when I first heard those click-clacks coming down the hall. I definitely felt my heart racing a little bit, and I got a little bit sweaty not wanting to look like a complete, utter idiot in front of this woman.
Beyond the Fear and Swagger
I was almost frightened by her and this paralyzing sense of not wanting to mess up, not wanting to look stupid, and wanting to have this person like me. It's myself and one other co-resident who are working under her supervision.
Anyway, so she shows up. She's very pleasant, very nice, and makes me feel at ease.
That first day she really helps calm us both down because, as I said, completely green. It's the first week of intern year. Besides being overwhelmed with all of the novelty and adjusting to the hospital system and actually having this real sense of responsibility for the first time, we're with this very intimidating woman, again, because she's so intelligent and just very good at her job.
As things went along, I found she was actually extremely easy to work with. She has this really great dry sense of humor that cuts the tension and puts you at ease. Slowly our rapport built and we started sharing things about our personal lives.
She would ask me where I'm from, what my family did, if there were other physicians in my family, about my siblings, about my outside-of-work interests, etc. I would do the same with her and she would show me photos of her newborn child and kind of make jokes about the wonders of early motherhood and what-not.
On top of that, she would also be very good about sending out landmark trials and studies in psychiatry, not really expecting either of us residents to read it given the fact we're so overwhelmed. But just giving us the information in case we were interested.
She really taught us in a way that was evidence-based and not remotely condescending, but in fact, very welcoming and conducive to our learning. I really appreciated that.
As the years have gone on now, now that I'm a third-year resident, she and I have kept up a very nice email/pen pal kind of relationship. I'll send these long diatribes to her about things that I'm up to, thoughts that I'm having, my evolving relationship with psychiatry in general, and where my evolution in that progress is.
Then, she'll write back very thoughtful, equally as lengthy emails validating my thoughts, giving her own input, giving her own experience as a resident and her own journey in how she's progressed through and how she's approached psychiatry and ultimately landed in the career she now has.
'Stop Calling Me Doctor'
It's just become this very rich intermingling between personal and professional life. I anticipate after I finish residency I would definitely consider her someone I would spend my time with. I would hang out with her and her husband and her kid.
It's really neat to me how you can go from this sense of being completely utterly intimidated and feeling like a complete inferior to someone, which is mostly in my own head, if not completely. Then over the course of time, working together and even being in a supervisor/supervisee position, you slowly grow to being colleagues.
At the end of my last rotation with her where she would be my direct supervisor, she told me, she was like, "Ronil, you need to stop calling me doctor and address me by my first name now." That was a little bit difficult getting used to, but I address her by her first name now.
You come into residency and you have an idea and it makes sense intuitively you're going to get along with your co-residents, the people you're going through, suffering through, the training with.
I have been very pleasantly surprised, though, by how I feel like I've connected with those who have many more years' experience than I do. We have really built this relationship both from a supervisor/supervisee role to becoming very friendly and hopefully relationships I'll be able to cultivate well after I graduate from this residency program.
Other stories in the Got Your Back episode: Patient Jekyll, Mr. Hyde and Over Her Dead Body
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