Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Two days down, 40 more to go.

Internal Medicine is kicking my butt. I am on day 2 of a 6 week rotation. Long hours. There are 4 medicine teams, and we have a rotating call schedule that goes like this:

Long Call - you admit patients from 4pm to 5am the next morning. Although if the AM and PM teams already took 5 patients, you get to start admitting earlier.
Post Call - everyone that stayed overnight gets to go home by noon.
PM Call - your team admits 3 patients sometime before 4pm.
AM Call - you admit two patients by noon.
Start the four day cycle all over again. On weekends, you only admit patients if your long call day falls on a Saturday or Sunday - if you aren't on call during the weekend, then you just go in and round on your patients with your team and then go home.

But wait, you ask, what about your day off, Shannon? Silly friends and family, there are no days off. Well almost - I have three days off that I can take during the next three weeks. But, as I was told, you really shouldn't take off any day that your team is admitting patients, and you also cannot take a post-call day off. Oh well. I get to take this Sunday off. Woohoo!

These rotations are funny things. In some ways, they are very cool - you get to participate in the care of very complicated and very ill patients. You learn a lot about treatment decisions and get to do some procedures (Raul drew several arterial blood gases while on Medicine.) However, as a third year medical student, you have no control over your schedule or your comings and goings. You get to report to the hospital at a specified time for rounds, and then you round on all your team's patients for several hours, and then you go back and sit in the rounding room and read articles on various internal medicine topics until someone tells you that it is okay for you to go home. Don't really like so much being constantly told what to do. The rotation is still just beginning, and it will likely get a lot better (I hope!). I have just been thinking lately that I really should have gone into social work.

On the brigher side, spring is here!! I also have a ton of seeds I need to plant, so they'll be ready to go in the ground in mid-May. All the bulb plants are starting to come up and the weather has been gorgeous!

I will post soon about that baby blanket--assuming Greta decides not to appropriate it first.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Hey Shannon, Who is the baby blanket for?

Anonymous said...

Yes, I also would like to know who the baby blanket is for.

Your rotation schedule sounds TERRIBLE. I hope it's over soon!

Unknown said...

Why, dad I thought you knew. It's for your granddaughter. It looks like Shannon finished it just in time, too!

P.S.- By "granddaughter", I mean Greta, of course.

Anonymous said...

Raul. You're Evil.

I had visions of red-headed babies.

Anonymous said...

Hi Shannon, this is a test only a test.

 
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