So I'm spending my last night shift sitting in the doctor's lounge. I just watched Armageddon in its entirety with a nurse... it's a little slow tonight.  I think my resident is sleeping in the call room which is a little weird because it's only 8:30pm, but she did have a huge exam today and she's not normally on nights so maybe she is try to stockpile any hour of sleep to help her get through the night.  There was a supposed to be a C-section at 7pm that I don't think has happened yet.  That patient was my first one this rotation who said no, she wasn't comfortable having a medical student observe her surgery, so I'm waiting around for that to happen so I can do some more waiting around.  Oh well, my other nights were pretty busy (which I like because it makes time go fast) so I can live with one slow night.  It's just that I'd much rather be at home watching tv than in the call room watching tv.  It would probably be a good idea to sneak in some sleep myself to help transition back to a normal schedule for Monday morning.. but after a full week I'm finally adjusted to being nocturnal and I'm not tired at all.  Today I was actually able to sleep solidly throught the day without waking up every hour like I had all week.  Not that I want to stay on nights by any means... it makes you feel very out of touch with the world.

 

That movie about the president being shot with Matthew Fox just started, but I'm afraid I'm not paying enough to watch it.  It looks like one of those focus-requiring movies.  Speaking of Matthew Fox, I didn't get to see any of the Lost episodes this week, so that is going to be a highlight of my weekend.  And I think Fringe started... yay TV!  And, real life again! 

 

Perhaps I'll write again if boredom hits.  Now, I'm going back to work.. watching my movie.

Monday the "small" scrubs were tight; bootylicious even.
Yesterday they were a good size.
Today they are making me look like MC Hammer.

The obvious conclusion is that I'm shrinking.

Another possibility involves three bears.

Oops.
Didnt mean to post my full name and email with those last two entries... they got auto added with emails sent from my phone. (I email my blog to post to it.)
But, I can't *edit* blog posts from my phone, only my computer, and as my Internet is still out FOR NO REASON, there they will stay until I get to a computer at work tomorrow. grrrrrr
In the meanwhile, don't harrass me ;-)

From my phone, because my Verizon internet is out for no reason (it's not even thundering!)

Three things that surprised me today:

1) Private practice obstetricians aim to complete a C-section in 15 minutes.
2) The "radio-controlled" "atomic-set" clocks in each OR and pt room of the labor and delivery suite are not synchronized.
3) West Jersey scrubs run a lot smaller than Jeffeson or VA scrubs.

So not only am I going to miss a friend's birthday dinner, the first meeting of a yoga class I signed up for, and the premiers of Fringe and Lost (also FotC?) next week due to being on night float, I am going to have my period all week. That's it, I'm quitting med school.

Quote of the day

"you have to go from man-on-man to zone defense." -a (female) OB
attending on having more than two kids.

Ol' Bloggy here got a makeover. Enjoy.

This morning when I left the house, I was upset to see a few bags of garbage out front. When other people leave garbage in front of our apartment, our landlords receive a ticket in the mail (and because our landlord is so sick of these tickets, she has sworn to schedule a hearing, come into the city, and fight each and every one). I'm supposed to call her when there's garbage so she's forewarned and can start fighting the ticket before it even comes.

This morning, though, it was 6am and I was running to the car and I was dreading finding time later to remember to call her. Before I had totally figured out what to do, I noticed that there was also garbage out across the street. Then I realized that we were actually the only people who hadn't put out the trash. Oh yeah, Wednesday nights are garbage nights. Oops. (At least I didn't have to worry about the phone call.)

Then this evening, at about the same spot in front of the house, on the way back from the car as I walked along staring at my feet trying to avoid any doggy doo or other sidewalk presents, I suddenly noticed that I had on two very different colored brown dress socks. I was surprised to notice it at that moment because it was twilight and probably the worst lighting of the day, because my socks had been quite visible all day, and mostly because during a contemplative moment during my solo lunch I had stared at my feet (or rather my left foot, I guess) and pondered the shade of my socks (sock) and how they really matched the paisley print of my shoes more than they matched my pants. I SPENT LUNCH STARING AT MY SOCKS AND I DIDN'T NOTICE THEY WERE TWO DIFFERENT COLORS.


These experiences have led me to two conclusions:

1) The spot in front of my house is some sort of Epiphany Spot where I reach a higher level of understanding than is possible at any other place during the day.

2) I am failing to perform basic functions of adult life, such as moving the trash from the inside to the outside of my home and getting myself dressed in the morning. I am starting to worry.


---
Chief Complaint of the Day: "I've been having heavy bleeding for 7 weeks. Is that normal?"

Stealing an idea....

Chief Complaint of the Day: "I'm dizzling."

So... I ended up in gyn clinic today.
After shadowing two prenatal appointments, I started seeing patients by myself. Then after a couple of times, the nurse practitioner stopped coming in to double check my assessment, she just took my word for it and signed off. Um, what about me looks like I know what I'm doing?

After the morning of prenatals, the afternoon was gyn appointments. I think I did six pelvic exams, having learned to do so <48 style="font-style: italic;">one other I have ever examined.

The nurse practitioner did check my pelvic exams up until the last one (she either assumed I had mastered it by then or did not want to stick her hand into that discharge-filled vagina... bacterial vaginosis is smelly. I don't feel bad saying that because the patient came in having diagnosed herself saying, "I know it's BV because it smells so bad.")

[Honestly, it was a really cool day. I love outpatient medicine, the patients were great and I really got to talk to them, and I got to do a lot of procedures. I'm looking forward to tomorrow.]


I apologize for the gross content of this post, but this is going to be my life for the next 6 weeks. If this wasn't your ideal reading material, you might want to come back Monday when I'm on the obstetrics floor and try your luck, but I can't promise it'll be much better. Week three I'm on nights, so don't expect much coherence.

Glen just compared me to Doogie Howser (in the medical journaling at night time on a computer way, not in the boy genius or Harold&Kumar sort of way), so I think it's time to go to bed.


P.S. The residents pretty much broke up the schedule for us, so there were no hair-pulling cat fights on the floor of the OB lounge this morning. To have a sample schedule to fit us into, they pulled out the schedule that had been draw up for Block 1 in the 07-08 year, and of the five people on that list, there was one of our groomsmen!

I love voting people off the island.

Tomorrow I dive into the unknown! Five of us are heading out to Vorhees NJ for our ob/gyn rotation. It's six weeks and we know we have to do two weeks of ob/gyn clinic, two weeks of gyn surgery, and two weeks of labor and delivery. However, we don't know which we're starting tomorrow yet, so I have no idea what the day will hold. The worst part for me is that the five students have to decide who's doing what when, and I just met these folks yesterday. Already I know that three of us want to do the surgery part first and only two may do it at a time.

The two weeks of labor and delivery involves one week of day shifts (6a to 6p) and one week of night shifts (6p to 6a) and usually someone will get stuck on the night shift the last week; the week when you take the exam. Luckily for us, what would have been our sixth person switched off the rotation so we are going to try to arrange it so none of us gets stuck, and have our five respective night weeks be the first five weeks of the rotation. So this means only one student will do L&D the last two week slot. To complicate things, the schedule choices make it sound like that same student will have to be the *sole* student to do surgery first. Who will it be? I see this whole thing playing out something like Survivor, Vorhees edition.

If I deliver a baby tomorrow, I'll let you know.

WC

I'm starting my ob/gyn rotation and tonight I had to go to a skills session where we (re-)learned to do the breast exam and the pelvic exam. It was my first time doing the pelvic exam on a person instead of a model. You see, this session was run by a group of medical professionals who teach the exam and females who volunteer to have the exam practiced on them... repeatedly in one night.

At the beginning the women went around and gave their name, their background, and how long they'd been involved in the group. The last woman had been involved only a few months, but she assured us it was enough: "This isn't my first clam bake."

I knew then that my vacation was definitely over.

***
("WC" was a hated comment I often received on my highschool English papers meaning "word choice")

Our first formal dinner party was a success! (Although I guess it's not too hard to impress your moms.)

Happy New Year!

Just a few hours left to 2008! I remember so clearly the first few moments of this year, when Glen and I looked at each other and said, it's 2008! It's really here! It was like the fact that we were going to get married didn't fully set in until it was the year that we had been talking about for so long.

And, it was a great year :-) The first half was non-stop wedding planning, and after the Big Day was over, we came back to the hospital for the second half of medical school. First in psychiatry, my desire to become a doctor was reaffirmed... then in surgery I discovered I really really don't want to be a surgeon, both important realizations. I've also made some new friends in my new class and it's been wonderful; I guess if you spend 14 hours a day with someone for 6 weeks you're either going to end up loving them or hating them, and I got the former.

Now Glen and I head into the second half, and I have the feeling that as I made it through the fall, I can make it through the spring. There is also the wonderful feeling that in one year we will be effectively done... second semester seniors :) It's in the foreseeable future!

We spent a lot of time with family. There were a lot of birthdays. Somehow in our free time we managed to attend 4 weddings (and I attended 4 wedding showers). There were also a handful of funerals.. we lost a family member in his 90s, and family friends in their 20s and 50s. And on the flipside, we found out a friend is pregnant!

We ended the year with lots of friends here in Philly celebrating Glen's birthday. We've been out of college for almost 4 years now and yet we're still managing to get together every few months; I'm proud of us! If Glen weren't sick with bronchitis, we'd be ringing in the New Year with you guys tonight!

For a final reason to celebrate in 2008, two very special friends got engaged this weekend! It's not on facebook yet, so I don't think I should be the one spreading the news. I just can't wait for all the fun!

2009 holds our last full year of medical school, our first wedding anniversary, the first baby in our group of friends, lots of wedding planning for someone else this time, a young friend starting high school (which makes me feel old), President Barack Obama, a hopefully a thousand more reasons to enjoy this trip around the sun.

Happy New Year!

An a cappella song came on my Pandora holiday station.

"Unless this is the group from Carmen Sandiego, this is getting turned off.
...
Rockapella! This IS the group from Carmen Sandiego!!!!"


Amazing.

Today was the half way point between Christmas and Thanksgiving. I did
feel especially in the holiday spirit, but I think that was because I
was actually in a good mood today due to my working in the outpatient
clinic rather than the OR. These two half-days on outpatient have
renewed my desire to become a doctor, after 11 weeks in the OR all but
squelched it; they've reminded me that medicine can be enjoyable! (It
remains to be seen how I feel about inpatient medicine and, I guess,
the ER)

4 more days of work, then our exam, and then three weeks to recuperate!

The Team

This morning on rounds the 10 person team was spilling out of the
patient's room into the hallway and he asked the doctor if he had the
whole Verizon team with him. I like humor in the AM.

Also, I wanted to explain that I wasn't trying to say that that was an
excessive amount of hours. Lots of people work that much per week. I
just had promised to report the total. :)

med school, continued (and continued... and continued...)

A common question and actual answers I have received:

Could you rate your pain from 1 to 10?

"22"
"really bad"
"7 and three quarters"
"well last week when I was at the grocery store....."



The total for the week was 59 hours.

It's my patient's 83rd birthday tomorrow. I hope we send him home to
celebrate. He'll be with me always... as I believe there is a
worrisome amount of his bone dust in my lungs.

LONG day today -- even longer than my work-plus-business-school days
last year! It's really hard to get home at the time you should be
heading to bed. I always have to stay up and unwind a little bit. But
then, here we are, hours past bedtime. I'll give you the hours worked
tally at the end of the week. I bet it doesn't sound as impressive as
it feels.

Good night!

13 hours today.
The weird thing is that it didn't even feel long... I don't know if
I'm acclimated or if it's just being in the OR that makes it go fast.
The worst part is looking at the clock and actively thinking about the
time... things like "I left my house 12 hours ago" and "I thought I
would be cooking a nice dinner by now."
I think if there were no clock in the OR I could go all day and night
and be perfectly happy. Ignorance would be bliss.

The skyline from the skybridge:

oops... I missed November.

It was a good month, filled with Anesthesia. I semi-took the week of Thanksgiving off. I studied and cleaned and did laundry, very exciting.

I'm pretty excited it's finally December. It makes it feel like the year is over, and vacation is only a few moments away. Also, that means the whole school year is so much closer to over, and we can get this med school thing one step closer to done with.

I started a new rotation today. I thought idepts were supposed to be light. I worked 11 hours today with coming in later than will be usual. I'm beginning to hate the hospital. I'm coming up with a nice list of careers I could do with my degree that don't involve treating patients. I think consultants get paid pretty well.

Also, I hate neck anatomy. And all of anatomy.