Letting go

While I was walking home from a "lunch date" with my daughter yesterday, I inexplicably started to get pissed off about the fact that I never had a baby shower. I don’t know what set me off. There are a lot of babies in my neighborhood, so maybe that was it.

As a pregnant person, I was just starting out a new residency thousands of miles from my family and where I went to med school and college. I didn’t have many (any) friends nearby, at least not female friends. There were only a couple of other female residents in my program. I have no sisters. So really, I didn’t expect to have a shower. No problem. I got some presents independent of a shower.

Then a year later, another female resident (let’s call her Tina) in my class got pregnant. One of the (female) attendings at my residency, one who had actually been my attending when I was about five months pregnant, said to another female resident, "We should plan Tina a baby shower."

The other resident told me about this and I flew into an absolute rage. I was SO angry that this attending would show such blatant favoritism. Also, it was embarrassing for me. Moreover, Tina had tons of friends and family in the area and surely had her own shower planned. I said I was going to boycott any attending-planned shower, I was that angry. But the shower never ended up taking place, possibly because someone clued the attending in to the fact that I was angry, or possibly because most of the residents didn’t like Tina very much. (I liked Tina, but I was still furious about the shower.)

Anyway, after getting extremely worked up over this and planning out a whole MiM entry in my head, I thought to myself, "Why am I still angry about this? It happened YEARS ago!"

I’m still angry about other things too:

I’m still angry at the senior resident who verbally abused me during my first ward month as an intern (For examples, read some of my cruel resident stories). I’m still angry at the co-intern who gave me shit about taking a night off when I had a threatened miscarriage. I’m still angry at this gunner med student who stole my first delivery on OB/GYN. I’m still angry at the attending who was so slow on the weekend that I was rounding for 14 hours in a row on a Saturday. I’m still angry about... too much.

This week, my medical training comes to an end. Four years of med school, a year of internship, three years of residency, and a year of fellowship. Obviously, I’m never going to forget all the miserable moments, but maybe I can try to stop being so angry about them. Maybe I can finally let go of that anger. Maybe I can focus on the good memories, of which there are also many.

Dear medical training: You suck sometimes, but I forgive you.

Besides, I’m sure I’ll find all new stuff to get pissed off about next year.