vintage scutmonkey: doctor id

This is a rare bird indeed, in that it is the one Scutmonkey comic that I never disseminated widely. I in fact never completed this strip. This string of panels originally ran with the tag line," To Be Continued... "but I never followed it up, because...I don ' t know. I think it just never felt very funny to me. Don ' t get me wrong, for someone who has worked in the Peds ER, there is a decent dose of acerbic humor in there, but on the whole, when taken with the other comics I wrote, it felt...kind of darkly bitter. A little too much dark, and a little too much bitter.In retrospect--and I don ' t think I needed that much distance from that time to realize this, I think I even realized it at the time--there was a point in my first year of Peds residency when I was likely borderline clinically depressed. It was circumstantial depression, certainly--I think many of us were at the time--but nonetheless it was a period of my life that both imprinted deeply and which I don ' t remember well. Day blended into night, one rotation blended into the next, there was very little time, very little spontaneity, very few genuine sparks of joy that I can recall. This had very little to do with my residency program per se (to this day I have nothing but good things to say about my Pediatrics residency, which turned out some of the finest doctors I know), but had everything to do with the nature of residency itself, which somehow, despite all best intentions, tends to bleed the humanity out of...
Source: the underwear drawer - Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Source Type: blogs