The Birthday Gift

I spent the evening of my 27th birthday working overnight on the labor floor. I had been an intern for just over a month and had begun to feel the slight, constant tug of fatigue and stress on my spirit. I had emerged from medical school with an abundance of excitement and confidence about my career. This attitude was rather easy to maintain in the face of my senior-year schedule, which included more vacation and travel than I had in my life. When 1 July, the fateful day when a new class of interns joins the medical community, arrived, I didn't understand what all the fuss was about. Internship would be great. All the fun of learning about patients and diseases I had enjoyed in medical school, with a little more responsibility. A paycheck. What's not to like?

A few weeks of working every night on the labor floor later, I realized that trying to answer questions I did not fully understand, trying to be in 3 places at once, and trying to learn at the same time could be exhausting and demoralizing. When I woke up on my birthday, it was 4 p.m. and I was still tired from the shift before. The labor floor intern's default position is in triage, where any patient greater than 20 weeks' pregnant coming to the hospital first presents. Most of these patients have contractions. But plenty of them have earaches or stuffy noses or want to know whether the baby is a boy or a girl and heard they might get an ultrasound if they came to the …