Thoughts About Clerkship

Clerkship is tough like one has ever imagined. It is like going in a battle ground, thinking you’ve had all the vital weapons ready to swing your Excalibur and metal shield but you found yourself at the edge of a thick forest alone. Clueless of the kind of monstrous creature you’ll be fighting, and worse, no one’s there to back you up. You. Are. Entirely. Alone.

I was never the kind of person who complains, but I believe there’s a maximum threshold for everything which includes patience. One can never be too patient. There’s always that maximal point where the pressure chamber burst unexpectedly. Other people outside our field look at us as future doctors, indeed we are, but at this point of our lives we are slaves-slash-doctors-in-the-making. We have plenty of bosses, starting from the consultants, residents, nurses, nursing aides, and sometimes even the IWs. Oh, not to mention the patients themselves and their watchers. I do not understand the kind of stigma attached to every clerk, all eyes are on us. We are being scrutinized from our physique down to the littlest of our gestures or even the minutest whispers uttered. A single mistake is unforgivable otherwise you’d be the talk of the hospital. Good if you’re being talked solely in your department, but expect the news to encroach in the other departments as well. So even before your next rotation, predators are waiting to prey on you. Just get ready.

There are days when I do not know where to place myself, or how to act. You can never be outspoken, yet at the same time you can never be too kind. You can never ever be kind, predators have the tendency to become abusive. A mentor once shared his secret, he said: “When you’re a clerk, never say NO for an answer.” I hold on to that until one night when this amoebic predator repetitively calling me at the ER while I’m at the midst of a surgical job asking me to do something which do not belong to my scope that particular night, in fact that is her work and she’s being paid for that. So I answered the phone and talked in a very calm yet stiff sound: “Ay ma’am, naa man mi division of labor. Kung ER, ER ra ko. Dili ko pwede mag-ward karon kay daghan kaay pasyente gina-atiman nako diri. Naa man ako partner sa quarters. Palihog na lang ko adto, duol ra bitaw dira station. Kay dili jud mahimo na ibahin nako akong lawas. Isa ra biya ko ha…”. I have a hunch I was gossiped as “the clerk who did not refer blah blah’s chart to doctor blah blah”. Oh well, one cannot please everybody. I do not care what they say about me. Yes, now I can never care too much about feedbacks.

I was never exhausted like this in my entire life---both physically, intellectually and spiritually. Clerkship requires physical strength to keep you on the go. Feeling ill is a huge no-no, vitamins are our bestfriends and antibiotics are our initial shields. We are also intellectually challenged; there are days when I ask myself where have all those three long years of reading and memorizing gone? It’s depressing when you cannot answer basic medical questions. You try to dig deep down your neurons and find tangled bits and pieces of unrecalled medical knowledge. You’re blessed if the consultant is the calm one who just smiles when you cannot answer and tells you the right thing. However there are unlucky days when you get to meet the evil consultants who throw insults at you and questions your intellectual capacity in the presence of nurses, nursing students and patients. You feel as if everybody's scoffing at you!! You just wanna die immediately right then and there!!! Like you wish you never existed!!

Quitting is for the losers. And I am no loser; therefore, quitting is not an option. No damn way!!! As medical clerks, we console ourselves with the fact that no single doctor has had never undergone clerkship. We all have our fair share of stories and bloopers to tell. Maybe when we become consultants ourselves, we will look back at our mistakes and the craziness we did and laugh and shrug about it like it never happened. And it’s tempting to think about turning the table to our predators. *evil laugh*