Graduation is quickly approaching and I listen as my classmates are “dreading” entering their intern year. I can’t really blame them – I’d be ready to gouge my eyeballs out with rusty spoons if I knew I had a year of rounding with some internal medicine or surgery team on the horizon. Perhaps they see something at the end of the tunnel that never materialized for me. I see a lifetime of call, long hours, and dirty patients – that’s about it.

For me, the decision to not enter a residency was the best decision I ever made. Not once do I ever look back and have envy for any of my classmates who are off to programs all over the country to be overworked and underpaid. I am happy that I will never:

write another SOAP note;
be “pimped” by another attending;
have to give another presentation on some crap topic I care nothing about;
be inside the hospital prior to 5am, and not be a patient;
step foot inside an OR unless I’m the patient;
wear a face mask;
have to wonder if I get lunch today;
have to wonder what time I’ll get to sleep tonight;
have to come home late at night after my wife is already asleep;
“scrub in”;
touch another patient;
listen to another patient bitch and complain;
do another H&P;
make copies for residents;
look up labs;
bring in journal articles;
have to attend “rounds”;
do another prostate exam;
do another pelvic exam;
have to look at the vagina of a dirty, overweight, and smelly female;
have to ask a post-op patient if they’ve “had a bowel movement” or “passed gas”;
have to count the number of patients scheduled for clinic and then hope 80% don’t show;
record urine output;
note quality of stools;
change wound dressings;
culture wounds;
drain abscesses and then collect drainage for culture;
dread getting out of the bed;
look forward to one to two days off per month;

be unhappy.