I’ve written about physician and author Dr. Sayantani DasGupta’s concept of narrative humility before. The first piece I read of DasGupta’s was in Lee Gutkind’s 2010 collection, Becoming a Doctor. Her essay, “Intern,” is a compelling snapshot of a brand new physician.
DasGupta writes the piece in third person and reveals the things that she “hoarded.” The essay is reminiscent of Tim O’Brien’s classic “The Things They Carried.” I relate to DasGupta immediately, the hoarding of “Xeroxed protocols and carefully transcribed antibiotic regimen[s].” DasGupta brilliantly captures the unsure medical intern, who “hoards” in order to feel prepared for anything in a very unpredictable new profession where lives are at stake.
In describing the things hoarded, DasGupta outlines the life of the intern. She notes the importance of keeping “bottles of chemical developer” to look for occult blood in stool. They were always “impossible to find when you needed them” and “there was nothing worse than standing in a patient’s room with a gloved finger full of excrement and nowhere to put it.”
As the essay progresses, DasGupta’s hoarding becomes more figurative. She “hoarded her patients—especially the usually healthy infants,” who, she admits, during a hard night’s call provide an escape “just to hold and rock a baby.”
DasGupta describes hoarding her senses, “taste, primarily, because she found herself so empty” and the hand cream she rubbed on as a ritual, because “[s]he missed the feeling of her own skin.” She hints at how a career in medicine becomes all consuming, that “no matter how much she bathed, or how expensive her soap, her nose seemed filled with the smells of the hospital, the sick, and her own stale and sticky body.”
She is sincere about the toll arduous medical training takes on her sense of self, her physicality, her sexuality: “despite all the pain, she often found herself yearning—aching—to be touched.” DasGupta reveals the challenges to her own marriage during this intense time of training and that, as an intern, there is little space to think of anything else but the work: “In that stillness, she allowed herself to consider—would he wait until the end of internship to leave her? For the rest of the day and night, there would be no more time for such thoughts….”
Of course, DasGupta speaks of sleep and time, the difficulties of each as an intern working all hours of day and night, the pressures unceasing: “She hoarded sleep when she could get it, in the darkened backs of lecture halls, on the cheap, scratchy couches in the residents’ lounge….”
Ultimately, DasGupta’s essay reveals the inner dialogue of a new physician’s arduous first year, gives a glimpse of the challenges to those outside of medicine, and evokes memories for those of us who lived through it.
Writing Prompt: If you’re a physician, think back to your intern year or your first year of medical school. What did you hoard? Make a list. If you’re not in the medical profession, think of when you first started a new job — what did you gather around you to make you more confident, better prepared? Write for 10 minutes.