Sunday, April 15, 2007

Procedures

Not much going on. This month I am on a clinical procedures rotation. The first week and a half consisted completely of lectures (some of the days we didn't have to show up until ten!o!clock!!!) sponsored by the emergency and trauma surgery departments on resuscitation and advanced cardiac life support. Now, theoretically, should someone go into asystole, vfib, or vtach right in front of me I'll be able to do something about it. I'm still working on recognizing orthodromic reentrant tachycardias and other such things though.

The last two and a half weeks of the rotation consist of following an anesthesiologist around. Most students go to the main school hospital and are assigned a resident they are with everyday, and are supposed to remain in a case beginning through end. I have the advantage of being at a community hospital where there are no residents and I am the only student, and I am encouraged by the staff to "procedure hop", which means jumping in at the start of a case, intubating the patient, then jumping to another case to maximize the number of intubations I can do. Once I get the swing of things I think it will be beneficial and I should get to do lots more intubations than most of the other students. Right now though it just feels very weird to intubate someone I've never met, then leave before the operation starts. The problem with this rotation is that in between intubations it is unbelievably boring. After two hours I feel like I have worked a full day. Most days next week we will thankfully have lecture in the afternoons, but Friday there was no lecture and I stayed til 3:00. By the end of the day that was the most miserable I have felt this year, I don't know if I could have handled staying another minute longer. But fortunately everyone is very nice at this hospital, and everything just seems so much more relaxed than at the academic hospital. It definitely confirms my desire to be a community surgeon rather than an academic.

In May I will start family medicine in one of the rural areas "near" where I live. It will be the last rotation of my third year! In June I will do my trauma surgery sub-i, from which I will hopefully gain a couple letters of recommendation. I'm going to take July off and will take both the written and (grrr) clinical portions of Step II. Then I'll have to start applying for residencies.

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