Chao Ji, MD

Clinical Anesthesia Year 1

Rhode Island Hospital/Brown University

Chao Ji is finishing up her intern year in Internal Medicine at Rhode Island Hospital and starting her Anesthesia Residency tomorrow, July 1st!! This transition is an exciting and nerve-racking moment during a resident’s career. You gain so much foundational knowledge from intern year like how to manage common medical conditions (ie. diabetes, COPD, heart failure, etc.), understanding how an electronic medical record works, and how to communicate with various members of a medical team. Anesthesia residency is designed to build on this foundation, specifically focusing on physiology and pharmacology related to the perioperative period and developing hands-on technical skills necessary to provide safe and adequate anesthetic conditions. In this post, Chao reflects on her last day of intern year - reminiscing on how far she’s come and how much more she is going to grow in the next 3 years.

The final countdown…

I’m hunched over my computer in the medicine resident lounge, staring at the clock. 7:52 p.m. - i.e. 8 minutes left of my last long-call day. My legs start bouncing as my heart races in anticipation. Is this what palpitations feel like? Only 8 more minutes to go before the end of my medicine intern year. Unable to control myself, my eyes dart back to the clock… still 7:52p.m. I aimlessly click through previous patient lists to pass time. I come across my oldest list created as a July intern in the JaneBrown wards, nicknamed “JICU”. Intrusive memories flood my mind as I recall that month of running around like a crazed headless chicken, ordering potassium repletions and travel-off-telemetry orders like there was no tomorrow. I quickly move onto other lists. None of which, thankfully, are quite as jarring. For months, I’ve been impatiently awaiting the end of intern year and the start of CA-1 year. Now that they’re finally within reach, I can’t help but feel a twinge of nostalgia. Cringy but true. As taxing as this year has been, from coordinating management as primary team to writing notes nonstop, I’m grateful to have learned from and cared for patients who’ve presented from all walks of life. It has been a truly rewarding year working alongside my medicine colleagues. I let myself linger on this sentiment a while longer before an EMR notification snaps me back to the present. I look back at the clock. 8:01 p.m. Just like that, intern year is over. Come July, I’ll be a CA-1, aka glorified intern take two. This time around, however, it’ll be in the field I’m pursuing, and I’ll have a few more tools in my arsenal.