Rrrrrrrrring!

WAKE UP!

Wow, hello! The snooze is over! I have been on inpatient since Monday, and it is SO much busier/better than my outpatient experience was! My days usually run from about 6/6:30am-4:30/5pm. Then every 5 days my team (attending, resident, intern, me) is "on call", so we arrive at the hospital like normal at 6/6:30am but don't leave til noon the next day. I had call on Wednesday, and my team sent me home around 9:30pm, but I had to research about the patient that I got put in charge of so I was up til midnight, then woke up at 4:45am to get back to the hospital. Even thought I did get about 5 hours of sleep (maybe less, I toss and turn lately), I was tired come Friday (Thursday wasn't so bad, it caught up with me eventually though!).

We are on call again on Monday, but I can't stay overnight. I have lecture from 1-5pm on Tuesday that is mandatory, and I'm not allowed to get to the hospital at 6am Monday, leave there at noon on Tuesday, and still have to be at lecture on Tuesday afternoon...it interferes with duty hour restrictions. I can't be doing work/school stuff more than 30 hours in a row. But come my Saturday call I will be staying overnight AND not getting a day off that week (I work Mon-Fri, work all Sat until noon Sun, then work again Mon-Fri...phew!).

Needless to say I really like being more busy, but I still am only responsible for 1 patient at a time right now. So there is a LOT of reading time, which still throws me off. With the patient I had earlier this week that was fine because NO ONE had any idea what was going on (we finally decided autoimmune hepatitis with some unknown acute injury), but then they left the hospital against medical advice on Friday. So even though I got another patient on Friday, I'm still only at 1 patient. And the patient I got on Friday has something pretty straightforward (C. diff diarrhea), so hopefully I can get another patient on Monday...since we're on call I'm sure I will.

Medicine is a lot of sitting around and talking and looking things up on the computer, even for the resident and intern...not sure I really like that part. I just enjoy being with the patients and explaining to them what is going on with their body; my liver patient and family told me they really appreciated that I was going "above and beyond" to make sure they understood what was going on (even though I didn't really know much!) and told me not to lose my "awesome-ness". That made me feel pretty good.

Now I just need to get a little more motivation to study...I have started finally, but there is SO MUCH! Yikes!

Snooze

I'm back to boredom unfortunately. My morning clinic was cancelled today and tomorrow. This afternoon I spent talking about golf and traveling to Europe and driving tickets with two attendings while the fellows saw all the patients. This is my last week on outpatient, and I have to say that I'm glad. I enjoy the specialty clinics, but even there I am a little bit bored. I hate to say that and it seems like I just complain about EVERYTHING lately, but that's really how I feel about it. This is just not as exciting as I hoped it would be yet. I'm sure that by the middle of next week I will be kicking myself for complaining about having such a lax schedule, but it is just killing me right now.

When I'm not in school I should be studying. I don't really want to, so I'm not, but I feel guilty doing anything else, so mostly I just sit around. And that's boring. I had a huge talk with D last night about how I think I have become a boring person. There are a lot of things that I want to do, but I am either too lazy or too boring or too cheap or too busy or too whatever to pursue them. I shouldn't put things off because I fully believe in living for today, but I just feel SO guilty doing things that aren't school related when I know I have school things to be doing. Hopefully I can find some balance here soon because if not I will either fail out of school or be doomed to being the most boring person on earth.

Making Progress

This week got progressively better in terms of my schedule. It culminated with seeing 4 patients in 1 day at my normal clinic, which was definately a record. That was a lot more fun than what I had been doing thus far. It was only simple things, like checking blood pressure meds and Alzheimer's meds (that lady was so sweet, reminded me of my grandma), but it was fun to have things to do. And the patients were funny too. The guy whose blood pressure I was checking decided he would flex his arm without me knowing, so the blood pressure needle started jumping all over the place. I panicked, but then I realized what he was doing and had a good laugh.

I spent another day in hem/onc and really enjoyed myself. I was allowed to do basically everything on my own- look up the patients on the EMR (electronic medical record), see the patients, report to the attending physician, and write my note into the EMR. I also got "pimped" (aka asked questions by the attending, ex. what is the differential diagnosis for macrocytic anemia...something I should know but only knew part of), so it was a great experience.

Overall in the school department it was a good week. Hard to believe that I only have another 2 weeks of outpatient before my life is taken over by inpatient!