Social Support and Young Doctors

A young doctor standing in the emergency department, the reflexes not developed yet as the doctor stands observing the lab reports and the ECG, the patient suddenly collapses. Everyone rushes in and soon the pictures turns hazy and a wave of emotions takes over. 

Depression, anxiety and the feeling of failing, these are the things the young doctor feels. The patient did not survive. 

Change the setting, a patient presented with sudden shortness of breath, previous treatment reveals an enlarged heart. A big heart, its good to have a big heart everyone used to say, but in actual terms having Dilated Cardiomyopathy is not good at any level whatsoever! The young doctor starts the brief physical examination but could not find any pertinent findings, perhaps due to the inexperience. The patient feels better and is discharged from the emergency but is brought to the emergency again the next morning; only this time she is unconscious. No palpable pulse, fixed and dilated pupils, yet this was the same patient who was sitting and talking to the young doctor telling how she had lost her appetite, but now she was no more in this world. 

Things like these surrounds the doctor, yet not a single word is spoken from the tongue of this young doctor. There is an anger hidden, of failing to save a life, of not knowing what to do and how to do, of  life being so finite.
What I have learnt so far, have a good social support. If you're a young doctor, you will need a lot of social support; not because you don't know things but because you don't know how handle such emotions that will surround you once you deal with such cases. Everything takes time, but remember if instead of watering the seedlings, you start to pour gasoline, it won't sprout into a sapling nor would a sapling transform in a magnificent tree. Everything needs the right nutrient, in your first year or first few months, a young doctor needs a good social support so that those tough days where you doubt every single effort you make, where you question your decision to choose this profession, are dealt with in a proper way. 

You don't need to run when the first time you learn to walk, you can't! Similarly, you need to crawl first and then walk with support to be able to walk freely, but everything takes time. If all is well, things go well but everything gets to be there where its supposed to be when the right time comes along. Develop good social support, improve it, be there for people so when you need people there will be someone there at least, learn the basics and do not run after the advanced managements, you probably won't even remember them and no one would ask you to do dorsal rhizotomy on your first day in Neurosurgery  rotation, but they will rely on you to effectively manage a hypertensive crisis at early morning hours, or even ask you to manage moderate severity pain.