Lurking Gaps

So, the kid has syphilis.  And when the highlight of your week is diagnosing syphilis in an 8-week-old child, you don’t know whether to pat yourself on the back or run as fast as you can into the desert.

It’s all fine and dandy and heroic to diagnose venereal disease in babies and extract other babies in distress from their mother’s vaginas using vacuums but when it comes down to it I’d just like to do some well child checks. Or counsel people on contraception. Heck, constipation.

I’ve been learning. A lot. It’s having to look things up on the fly, or teach a resident something I’m rusty on, or following a patient’s course and working things up.

But I know that learning always means forgetting. You hope your forget the outdated stuff from medical school in order to assimilate more up-to-date information that you read off, uh, UpToDate. But you feel like what’s really happening is things are getting stuffed in one ear and falling out the other.

In the words of the great Dr. Nirvana, “I’m not afraid of what I don’t know, I’m afraid of what I don’t know I don’t know.” And then he made a smoothie.

And I’m afraid of getting cocky with a few correct diagnoses or timely decisions and forgetting that I don’t know what I don’t know that I forgot or never knew in the first place but should really be aware of in this very moment. Which doesn’t sound as catchy, now that I put it all down.

What gaps in my knowledge are just lurking around the corner, hiding in an exam room, haunting me at 3am on call?

I think I’ll run into the desert. But first I will have a smoothie.