On Medicine

The decided lack of posts recently is because I am On Medicine. "On medicine," in resident speak, means that I am working on the adult inpatient service in the hospital, which is one of the two most intense and time consuming rotations of the year. I'm two-and-a-half weeks into the six week rotation (there's another six weeks later in the year, but I'm not thinking about that right now).

I am coming up to a weekend off, which is excellent, as this past weekend I had the lovely Friday night-into-Saturday-morning call followed by the Sunday-all-day call. (Finishing up a nice, legal, 80 hour week.) That followed 11 to 12 hour days all week. And it was a bad weekend on the service, with pretty much nonstop action, requiring me to stay late after both calls to finish up paperwork. Ick. (Alex and Brynna and I did have a spectacular Saturday after I got done, a post on that will be upcoming eventually.)

So, poor Alex is doing the vast majority of the holding-down-the-fort at home. I get up around 6 and take Jasper out for a quick walk, then nurse Brynna if she is starting to wake up before getting on my bike and heading to the hospital for 6:45 or 7. Alex gets Brynna off to Miss A's and then goes off to work himself. He also picks her up at the end of the day, because I sign out to the night team between 5:30 and 6 and usually get home around 6:30. Then we play with Brynna for a couple of hours and put her to bed, before grabbing some food ourselves and also hitting the sack. It's kinda crazy around here these days!

I am certainly learning a lot at the hospital, though I would like the Emergency Department to do a better job triaging patients so that we don't have to admit people with musculoskeletal chest pain, and I would like patients to stop asking for IV narcotics for their chronic pain, and I would like families to treat each other nicely and stop fighting over their hospitalized parents.

Yesterday all of the interns went to a workshop all day instead of to our normal rotations, which was a TON of fun. Mostly because we all got a chance to talk to each other, which is rare as we are scattered throughout the hospital, and also because it was on our personality type and how to interact with others at work, and the facilitator was really good. And especially because I got to leave the hospital at 4 PM instead of 6!

Off to bed. I've got to sleep when I can! Still catching up from my sleepless Saturday night...