Excessive talking helps
You never know how much making random friends will help you out. Here's an excellent example yesterday. Or maybe it just showed how weird med student life is.
So I woke up Tuesday morning not feeling so hot. I ate breakfast, headed to the hospital, and then found out the first 2 surgeries were canceled so we had a few hours to kill. My stomach had felt sort of upset, but I ate my animal crackers and diet sprite anyway. Then I started puking. I reached the point where it was pretty much just dry heaves. After 4 hours of this, I was the color of paper, woozy, passing out in the restroom, and propping myself up on various walls.
Fortunately I had struck up conversations with one of the anesthesia residents at earlier visits. After establishing that I was so dehydrated it was tough to even find a vein (opps, too much studying and not enough drinking), I got my very own liter of Lactated Ringer's running into my arm. We ran that baby in so fast that we almost blew my vein and I ended up with quite the bruise afterward. The resident also made sure that I informed my attending who sent me home since there were no actual surgeries that day.
Good thing too. I had a 100+ temperature and wasn't at all appropriate to be around patients, even if I didn't look like death warmed over.
Moral of the story: be nice to everyone, even those not on your rotation. You never know when you'll be so dehydrated that someone needs to put an IV in you. Just make sure you have the anesthesia resident, not the PMR resident.
Labels: dehydration, IVs, residents, sick, surgery
Glass half sideways
On the day of a spinal surgery scheduled to last forever, I was sent this from '
black belt blue gi' for some inspiration.
His message:
"The pessimist looks at how many people are in front of him in line. The optimist looks at all the people behind him - they would count themselves lucky to have his spot."
My response:
"The realist stands in her 15 pound lead apron for 8 hours during spine surgery and realizes the resident is beside her, the attending across from her, and those lucky nurses behind her don't have to worry about contaminating the sterile operating field."
The lead apron you wear to protect you from the x-ray is heavier than you think it is. All of the weight just crushes you - though the other option looks like
this though it is possible that they were joking.
Labels: back pain, lead, protection, spine, surgery, x-ray
Good luck on that one, Lord
I've been on ortho surgery for the past two weeks (more on that later), but I was given the chance to remove the sutures off of the amputated fingertips of a schizophrenic homeless man who had many many other health problems. His fingertips were amputated because he'd gotten frostbite a few months ago. He was somehow consented to take two of them off - but 8 black necrotic dead fingertips remain.
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Attending: Sir, your fingers are healing well, but you have some other fingers that need to come off. Can we do another surgery to get the other ones?
Pt: No, just take the stitches out of my fingers. They are hurting me. I have so much pain.
Attending: In your fingers?
Pt: From that nurse who tried to poison me this morning. The pain in my legs and my head.
Attending: So you don't want us to do surgery. Those fingers aren't going to heal.
Pt: No, I saw these people, selling the God cream. You know the holy-rollers. Go door to door. I'll get that cream, and it will fix this. (waves those fingers again where you can see the dead bone sticking out of them)
Attending: You don't want surgery. You want to go with cream?
Pt: Yep. Cream will fix this.
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After I removed the stitches the attending came back in and tried again. The patient was very clear that he only wanted cream for his fingers and only the cream sold by those God people. He insisted God would be fixing his fingers with the magical cream. (He also went on at length about his voices and all the people out to get him)
I'm pretty sure his chart says something along the lines of 'Pt opts for non-operative treatment.'
One year already . . .
Last weekend Brian Shaffer has been missing for one year.
Please help us find him.Labels: brian shaffer, medical student, missing
Surgery Week IV
The last week on that horrible rotation.
Sunday 0 hours first day off in 2 weeks
Monday 8am-7:30pm 11.5 hours
Tuesday 5:30am-6:30pm 13 hours
Wednesday 5:30am-5pm 11.5 hours
Thursday 6am-7pm 13 hours
Friday 6am-3pm 9 hours
Saturday - off
A mere 58 hours in five days and that included that I got off a few hours early on Friday for an organized medicine meeting. My a$$hole chief resident came back on Monday, but all the surgery residents had a conference on Tuesday so they weren't around. I was really happy on Wednesday when our pissed of intern sent us to a conference that didn't exist and the chief threw a total fit b/c he thought the med students were skipping out on work. He treated us like crap for 2 hours before finally asking and realizing we had been there since 5:30 and had covered 12 patients he hadn't even seen.
So lets look at the bill. In the eyes of the hospital, I was a staff member for 26 days and worked a total of 285.25 hours. That averaged out to about 11 hours a day. I had two days off the ENTIRE month. I know I got off pretty lightly with the meeting and the doctors appointment. The residents, I'd estimate, worked at least an hour more than me per day.
Thank goodness my next service is super laid back and lots of outpatient clinic - ortho surgery.
Labels: hours, surgery
