Today was the first day of my Internal Medicine rotation. The IOR* was actually pretty friendly and accessible but she didn't try to soften the reality for us, and took a few hours to explain just how difficult and challenging this 8 weeks will be. This did not help our already pretty intense anxiety levels, but may have effectively numbed them. For some reason, all of us -this med student included- are remarkably freaked out about this rotation. Several of my friends have had nightmares (I woke up to my nightmare last night with an attitude of incredulity: Oh god, I can't be serious; I didn't just have a nightmare about my med rotation!!) ...some have not been sleeping at all.
Our IOR's advice-ridden talk consisted of repetitive statements such as: "You will learn a lot", "Just don't fall behind", "Make sure to start reading today", "You are your patient's doctors", "Don't try to read too many books; stick to a few, and make sure to get the 600+ textbook", "Your 14 write-ups should be done within 48hours of seeing your patients. Of course, 30 of those hours you will be on call and then you will be post-call and dead-tired and the last thing you'll want to do is write a 10 page paper on your patient, but you really don't have a choice because the next day you'll be on Jeopardy* and you'll likely get more patients to write up." (OK, she may not have exactly said the last few sentences, but we were already thinking them.)
Anyway, I am still excited about this rotation, mostly because I don't have a choice; otherwise it would be pretty damn miserable. I'm hoping to learn a lot, but I'm also obviously freaking out, in general, and more specifically, I am not quite ready to give up all this freedom to sleep, eat, and live like a normal human being that I've had the last two weeks.
I've made few "resolutions" to keep my life um, sane-ish and hopefully I'll be able to stick to them. To people with normal lives, maybe this will give you yet another reason to avoid your doctors, because obviously, the kind of people who voluntarily go into this profession must have some unconscious need to deny themselves happiness.
Resolutions-schmesolutions:
1. Rock climb once a week
2. Write in blog once a week
3. Make time for decompressing each day (45min for morning, including shower and breakfast; 45min for dinner)
4. No internet in bed
5. No internet until all my reading is done, except during dinner time
6. Sleep ideal goal: 10pm-4am; Reality: must get at least 4.5 hours
7. Do not drink more than 3 diet cokes a day, except on call days.
8. Sneak away to watch Daily Show in the call room on call days.
9. Buy burning man tickets
* Glossary:
IOR- "instructor of record" otherwise known as the doc in charge of our rotations/grades/future/destiny.
Jeopardy- a day in our schedule, on which our team is second in line for taking on new patients.
The call schedule goes like this:
day 1: "call": we take new patients on all day and stay through the night and until noon the next morning (the official 30 hour shift). If you are the med student, this is when you spend the night writing your 10+ page write-up on the new patient/s you take that day.
day 2: "postcall": that painful morning where we round on our patients and crawl home at noon to sleep. if you are the med student, this is where you try to desparately finish your write-up before the 48 hour deadline and before you faint from exhaustion.
day 3: "jeopardy": the day our team tries to manage our patients (and get them out of the hospital), while praying that we don't get new ones. If the call team is overwhelmed, we get more patients. Med student gets to write more write-ups and try to read from the text book, read up on her patients, and study for the test at the end of the rotation.
day 4: "Good day-1": this is the day our team shouldn't get new patients, but might, if the call and jeopardy team is overwhelmed. We should just be managing the patients we have (and really trying to get them out of the hospital). Med student goes home to study at the reasonable hour of 6pm.
day 5: "Good day-2": the one day we are guaranteed not to get new patients. It is also the day before our call day when we get to pick up new patients, so now we will probably be trying to trick our patients into leaving the hospital. Med student again goes home at 6pm, and starts to freak out about not having read enough.
day 6: Day off - HAHA!!! Nope, we start over, so it's another 30hour "Call" day.
Don't you have days off?! YES!! Under the new sanity rules, we are guaranteed one day off a week. yay!!
Oh, and after a month of this fun at the Med Center, I move on to the VA, where I will be on Call every 4 days, not five. Yikes!
So if I don't update for a while...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Just be gentle.
Post a Comment