As a medical student, resilience is one of the keywords thrown around by the university and the student support team. I have been a witness to the breaking of bad news many a time and felt keenly for the patient and their family receiving it... but have never found myself personally affected, I have always been able to remain detached and focussed.
What does always seem to upset me is the personal jabs that random (and I mean random, haven't introduced themselves or asked me my name) other members of staff feel the need to aim at me. Maybe they are having a bad day, maybe medical students are easy targets that they won't get comeuppance for aiming the nasty barbed words at that they would if they made the same comments to their colleagues. But it is not on! We are human too and it is ridiculous that we should receive all of the rubbish. We shouldn't be questioned on our professionalism, blamed for leaving something in the wrong place when no one told us where to put it in the first place, criticised for trying to get logbook signatures when we should be concentrating on learning but if we don't get the logbook signed then we are criticised for not doing everything we were supposed to do in the placement.
Why are these little tiny things the things that make me cry for hours, feel like its the end of the world and I shouldn't be carrying on with medicine, when the big things, the things affecting people's lives, I can brush off without a second thought. Maybe that is the effect of having the resilience on everyone else's behalf, allowing ourselves to bear the brunt of other people's frustrations, sometimes the "human" pent up inside us needs to slip through the cracks, and all come out at once.
What does always seem to upset me is the personal jabs that random (and I mean random, haven't introduced themselves or asked me my name) other members of staff feel the need to aim at me. Maybe they are having a bad day, maybe medical students are easy targets that they won't get comeuppance for aiming the nasty barbed words at that they would if they made the same comments to their colleagues. But it is not on! We are human too and it is ridiculous that we should receive all of the rubbish. We shouldn't be questioned on our professionalism, blamed for leaving something in the wrong place when no one told us where to put it in the first place, criticised for trying to get logbook signatures when we should be concentrating on learning but if we don't get the logbook signed then we are criticised for not doing everything we were supposed to do in the placement.
Why are these little tiny things the things that make me cry for hours, feel like its the end of the world and I shouldn't be carrying on with medicine, when the big things, the things affecting people's lives, I can brush off without a second thought. Maybe that is the effect of having the resilience on everyone else's behalf, allowing ourselves to bear the brunt of other people's frustrations, sometimes the "human" pent up inside us needs to slip through the cracks, and all come out at once.
