“The subject that is not talked about in the world of medicine

Many things are not talked about in the medical world – specialized doctors and medical staff, are silent, absorb and suffer in silence. It took me a long time to write this column and it was difficult, but I hope it will be a therapeutic experience for me, and maybe also a wake-up call for those who are currently in the place I was, and for those who are in key positions, to open their eyes and heart, if any.I want to write today specifically about the abuse of interns, in the intern, by other doctors, some of them are interns themselves. This is my painful and personal story. I was abused at work. I received humiliating and unfair treatment. I became a shadow of the pale and bent figure of myself, a broken vessel. Today I understand that it is PSTD, post-traumatic stress disorder.

This is a summary of the beginning of the path of unhappiness in the profession of surgery, at the beginning of my internship in a surgical department among the “best” in Israel. In the hope, albeit a faint one, that the future will be better and more promising.

A few years back: I really liked studying medicine, I especially liked the clinical rounds: meeting patients, like a detective investigating a mystery, reading the medical books eagerly, as if they were from the “Harry Potter” book series. But I especially liked being in the operating room during the surgery round, I would stay at night to participate in the operations of the surgical department. To this day, the operating room is one of my favorite places.

I finished my medical studies with honors, after that came the internship and with it came a lot of confusion: which specialty to choose? Everything is so interesting. I was also quite old. The never-ending years of study, followed by the internship and internship, collide with the end of the fertile years, but happily we discovered that we were pregnant. How the hell do I combine a surgery residency with a little baby girl? I decided that I would not give up and that I would succeed at both: both being a new mother and a surgical intern, for all the difficulty involved, to the dismay of my family members who understood that it was going to be tough.

I guess I’m not a typical surgeon. I am quiet and pleasant for the most part, and throughout my career I have heard a lot: “You are nice, you are suitable to be a pediatrician”, but in that department, perhaps precisely because of these qualities and more, I did not like some of the staff.

Later when I try to analyze what happened calmly, I understand things and see the warning signs that were always there, which I chose not to see. First, I became a mother and something in me changed: I gave 200% of myself, I came to the ward to work sick, I stayed to help without pay after shifts during which I didn’t always have time to pump milk for the baby, I tried to write articles, I was a “good, quiet, disciplined soldier” and mostly insecure. I was not a good enough mother to my daughter and that was accompanied by feelings of guilt that exist to this day.

Secondly, the person who recommended me for residency was a senior surgeon, an excellent surgeon but tough and unpopular. He met me when I was a “poisoned” student flourishing in the operating room during the clinical rotation. I think the fact that he “brought” me to the ward created antagonism. He was not a relative and did not receive favors of any kind from me. He recommended me because I was good. I chose not to use the strong ties I have, which are not blood ties, but the kind that would open almost every door for me in every department in the country. I decided to try to get accepted and also fail on my own. And I failed miserably…

Third, I started the internship in pregnancy. It sounds like a banal sentence, but it’s not, this sentence contains a lot of meanings: a lot of time has passed since I started working in the department as an outpatient and until the start of the official internship. Although I was promised a future and near standard, but this standard was given to a new intern who chose to use his connections and didn’t even do one medical shift. This phenomenon of promoting standards, repeated itself both before I started my internship and during it, for interns who were waiting for a standard that was caught at the last minute by another intern, a detestable but familiar phenomenon that is not limited to this department or a specific hospital. Lost time that led to a significant delay in the beginning of my professional career and many more months of substandard work, some of the time for free. When another standard finally became available for me, I was already pregnant with my second. What to do, life happens while waiting to fix…

One of the most hated things in the surgical department is an intern who becomes pregnant and thus “knocks out” the department. That is why there is a clear advantage that is not talked about in admissions for male specializations, as if going to reserve months is not the same. So to start an internship in pregnancy, apart from the fact that it is difficult, immediately creates an “anti” among the staff, I knew this in advance and did everything I could to not “knock” anyone: with all the limitations of my pregnancy, I was relatively healthy, strong and functional. I continued to do shifts after week 20, I went into operating rooms and was even exposed to radiation (in my stupidity at the time, I still have remorse about my little one), I worked almost as usual until the 39th week of pregnancy when labor began, at the end of a long day on my feet in the operating room and from there straight to the ward women and later on giving birth.

After three months of maternity leave, I received an angry call from the boss: “Maternity leave is over, you are returning to the department!”. I cried, I begged and in the end I came to a compromise of covering the department on the days when there is no staff, at my expense of course, during the maternity leave, as well as returning to shifts. My biggest fear was again, that I would run out of milk because of the stress, the lack of sleep, and the lack of breastfeeding or pumping, not to mention who would raise her. The guilt burned inside me that I was a crappy mother again and that my babies didn’t deserve it.

When I returned to work, about five months later, everything became worse, I was me, probably much more tired and ragged but me. In the department, several interns changed, some went on rotations, others returned to the department. As always, this is how it is in hospital wards, everything may change and turn upside down in an instant according to the staffing situation at that given moment.

The hospital, especially in the surgical department, is based on military education and even the jargon is similar: there are “young people” who “grind” more and anyone who has a second more PAZ than you immediately becomes your boss. Even if he says nonsense and does not justify himself as such And there is a hierarchy of bosses, of course, and there are many contradictions, because “where there are two surgeons, there are a hundred opinions”. I managed to fall into them.

My patients loved and appreciated me, I didn’t make unusual mistakes, I was almost never absent despite the baby’s frequent illnesses, thanks to invaluable help from my parents and my partner’s parents, my hands are good, I have always been creative and I like to analyze, but nevertheless, I became an object to constant abuse. mainly by the CHIEF RESIDENT The new, specialized “boss”, the one who gets all the power in his hands, who builds the duty schedule, who slots for surgeries, who is responsible for the fate of the interns. Once I politely disagreed with his opinion, I tried to understand why a patient must undergo a certain treatment, when there is another, safer option, or at least consider it…

And that’s it. From that moment he left me. I started regularly getting the most Friday and Saturday shifts, shifts that started, just for me, from the morning in the emergency room and also ended there the next day, I was barely assigned to surgeries and I was unable to progress and develop as a surgeon. I was a mother of two little girls and a young intern, in addition to the feeling of failure and depression, I missed my babies, I didn’t see my partner, friends and family, and I started to wonder if it was worth it… (spoiler – it’s not!) I was at the beginning of my journey, and I ate it.

Understand, every specialty is difficult, especially surgery, and everyone goes through an arduous journey on the long, winding and dubious road to the desired “specialist” title. But believe me it was different with me. It was clear that I was treated differently, that I was put on purpose, that I became the department’s punching bag. who are trying to exhaust me so that I retire, and I kept quiet, so it went on and on, and the friends next to me saw and kept quiet too. scared

Later I recognized in that intern a pattern from the world of psychiatry, he looks and behaves in a normative manner, even smart and talented, but, enjoys abusing those who are weaker than him, in short a psychopath. A good friend of that chief was not innocent either. A young senior, insecure at her core just like me, but who by virtue of her position finally got the power into her hands, who found me a convenient target for blame and abuse. Every bad thing that happened in the department was linked to me, even if I had no hand in it. I had to stay to help in the ward almost permanently after the shifts, when the rest of the night shifts were released to their homes. I went home after a shift that started at six in the morning, and ended the next day at noon, with quite a few “sandwich” shifts the very next day. Shouting, accusations, humiliations in Parsha, I will never forget it. I didn’t know how to answer and defend myself in real time. I kept silent. Nothing I did was good enough. The baby’s milk has decreased. I got fat. I got depressed. My insecurity grew.

A third intern was involved in the abuse mask. When I think about them now, I still want to throw up. I believe it was their way of feeling strong and victorious, like that, on the backs of the weak. on my back And maybe like in beaten families, they were beaten when they were young and therefore that’s what they knew how to do, hit. But I would never hit back. Maybe this is the problem and maybe also the solution, but not mine.

I hoped that one day they would learn to appreciate me, and one day the big boss would see them and understand that I am quiet and not forceful, but capable and I have already been able to face challenges and I will also succeed. But the big boss didn’t see and didn’t understand, he is a good and smart man at his core, but so naive. And when these key people expressed their opinion about me, he told me that if the situation continued, I would not stay to specialize in his “shiny” department. Even then, I still didn’t open my mouth.

I knew it wasn’t fair, but I also knew there were wars I wasn’t capable of. I ran away for a second before they kicked me out, and maybe they wouldn’t have kicked me out, and I would have continued to this day to be a punching bag, but I really couldn’t take it anymore. To this day I deal with this “failure”, no matter how the story ends. This is a failure for me, although spoiler number 2 – there is a happy ending here. Or maybe I really wasn’t good enough? But it’s hard to be good with such an attitude. I looked at other interns and they were no more “better” than me, luckily, they were not abused. Turns out I’m an excellent battered woman, and that’s exactly what I was.

to my delight,” Karma is a bitch!”, and I found another, lesser-known, smaller surgical department, which turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me. I was appreciated, I finally started to operate, I started to gain back the confidence I had lost, I received positive reinforcements instead of scolding which helped me to develop as a surgeon. And the patients? They still loved me. I was me. Like I was there, only calmer, less scared, with more peace in my heart.

And my new boss? I love him. To this day he is my “surgical father” who teaches me how to be a good surgeon, but mostly how to be a human being. i won Maybe I should even say thank you to my abusers. And for the icing on the cake, to end our story, not much time passed, and the same senior interns who abused me found, how surprising, other interns to abuse, but they, fortunately, were not suckers like me, this became known to the manager, and along with several other big mistakes they made, The sin of arrogance and urine that rose to the head, and the two were expelled from the department, nearing the end of their internship. We already said that – Karma is a bitch?

These words were written from my heart’s blood, hoping to heal from this wound that still accompanies me. And I know I’m not the only one. There isn’t a week that goes by that you don’t come across a post on one of the forums of doctors in Israel. It happens all the time. Even today. Unbelievable. It happened, to a lesser extent but no less painfully, to my partner during his internship, he is also a doctor and above all, the person with the best and purest heart you know.

In a department where I believed that whoever chooses to work there must be the best person there is, but no, the ego, the evil and the ability to step on others to gain power, this insolence, is everywhere. So please, don’t be like me. fight blow up make war You don’t have to live in fear. No need to become a broken vessel. Nothing is worth it. And at most you won’t be there anymore, and probably for you it shouldn’t be either, you are good and successful and you will find the right and exact place for you. And to the department managers and everyone who reads this and is in a key position – be human, open your eyes, get out of the office and try to understand what is really happening to your team, you may not like what you find out.