For those of you who wonder whether young people who choose medicine still care, please read this note from three of our interns to the nurses on the oncology (including bone marrow transplant) units with whom they worked during their month-long rotation on those floors. (And, of course, it says something really nice about the nurses, too!)
As we're finishing up our last few hours on BMT/OMED, we want to thank you for all your help in the past month. We started with three consecutive code blues in our first week, and it has been a tough five-week block for us interns. But we have learned a lot from the patients and you guys. Thank you for showing us the ropes, for always being the most fervent advocates for the patients, for being so responsible, responsive, and prompt to remind us when we forgot to order labs or TPN. Thanks for your patience, your smiles, and, many times, your food!
We wish we knew more medicine, more ways to relieve pain, more treatment strategies so that our patients could have a few more months with their loved ones. We wish we could have done something differently so that the patients didn't have to spend Thanksgiving evening with us. We wish that we didn't have to tell so many twenty-two-years-old the new diagnosis of lymphoma, that we didn't have to announce so many deaths. We wish we could have helped you guys more in your care for the sick.
Thank you for everything.
Soo....I'm betting at least 2 of the interns were women. Am I right?
ReplyDeleteThat's great to see...especially the evident respect between nurses and the interns. In our (admittedly) limited experience with pediatric oncology hospitals, there is no doubt that everything runs much better from a patient's point of view when doctors (and students) and nurses respect each other's expertise.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like you've got a good group of interns there.
This was nice to read. Sounds like an extraordinary team you've got in that department. If only every department in every area of patient care at all hospitals could have this type of team!
ReplyDeleteWhat a nice group of interns. That must mean a lot to those nurses, and they must have meant a lot to the interns. Amazing how far a little good will goes. Thanks for sharing this.
ReplyDelete