Field trip

Yesterday while I was on my break the other medical student and her intern discharged all my patients! The DVT patient was accepted to the domiciliary (Yes!!!), and he finally decided to give himself shots, so he was able to leave this morning. Since most of our patients are gone, we didn’t really have anything to do this morning, so our senior resident took us on a field trip. Basically we wandered around the hospital looking for interesting things to see. We stopped by physical therapy and watched one of our patients do leg raises, stopped by dialysis and watched patients hooked up to the dialysis machine, and lastly went by the pulmonary lab to watch a patient getting a pulmonary function test. After sitting around, eating lunch, and going by the VA store (a bizarre collection of sales tax-free candy, TVs, MP3 players, coffee makers, T-shirts, games, etc) for candy, our attending stopped by and lectured to us about mechanical ventilation which was interesting because I have never had a lecture on it before. Around 2:00, we got a patient from the ER who had been having abdominal pain since Monday, most likely he has an obstructed bowel. He will have to be seen by surgery, all we can really do right now is give him IV fluids since he hasn’t been eating or drinking much. He is a really nice 87 year old man which is a nice change from the unpleasant patients I’ve had recently.

Before I left, the attending dropped by again and asked if we wanted him to bring pizza on Sunday (call day). We all started to hem and haw and politely indicate that if he really wanted to we would love it, but the senior resident just came out with a loud “heck, yeah!” Unfortunately, I have to work on Sunday, but I am really excited to get tomorrow off—I will be able to sleep in as long as I want for the first time this month (and probably the last until my golden weekend [medspeak for Saturday + Sunday—how sad is that that we need a special term for full weekends] at the end of September). The only problem is that now I'm so used to having to get up I'll probably wake up at 6:00 and not be able to go back to sleep.

I have to take the shelf exam on Thursday, then I will start general surgery on Friday—I’m looking forward to it, but one of my friends was on the same rotation last month and he had to work 75 hours a week—I’m hoping that I will have slightly more lenient residents.