Sunday, December 07, 2008

New job, new life

Well it's not excatly a new life - but I'm now a pediatric intern at a medium to large children's hospital. Life is weird like that because two years ago I thought I was going to be a single Emergency medicine intern in Ohio.

Internship is kind of rough, it's about finding the balance of work, sleep, and spouse right now. Call takes on a completely different meaning when you are an intern than it did as a medical student. You really are the doctor; you are supposed to have an answer for the problem. (But not THE answer, ask your senior for that)

I'm on my sixth month of internship, and let's see what I accomplished.

July: lots of well baby checks!! Saw my brother get married.

August: step down NICU and first call month. Attended multiple deliveries, saw 2 that didn't make it, and got my first infant intubations and line placements.

September: trial by fire in Peds ED. (Decided not to pursue Peds EM as a fellowship.) Lots of stitching and 2 lumbar puncture attempts.

October: learned alot about peds cancer and learned that to stop SVT you really need to smash that bag of ice on the baby's face.

November: Newborn Nursery - 20 baby checks per day with a gaggle of med students. Also, I'm not going into infectious disease.

December: back in step down NICU, remarkably easier this time as I am not completely lost.

I've still got multiple months on wards, NICU, and wards again before I am a second year. And also step 3.

Wish me luck, and I am still caffeine free (no caffeine since before my senior year in college)

Labels: , , , , ,

posted by Allie @ 10:37 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

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: , , , ,

posted by Allie @ 8:18 PM 2 comments