So, it's the end of the first day. I think the most surprising thing was the fact that I spent very little time with patients today. Don't get me wrong, they were on my mind almost all day. But, I spent very little time with them. As a medical student you are the one who spends 30 minutes talking to each patient, but spend absolutely no time worrying about their management. Today I fretted over the dose of pain meds, whether to discharge a patient or not, the state of their wounds, their mental capacity but I spent very little actually talking to them.
I always thought the residents I'd worked with in the past were callous for not spending time with their patients. I guess I'd never realized how much time they spent dwelling on their patients even when they weren't there. Right now as I sit here typing this I keep thinking back to the Polish man who woke up from surgery with a strange dry patch on his face, the woman whose endocrinology follow up I'd scheduled and all the other patients from today. Their faces and our brief conversations keep swimming on the periphery of my psyche.
But, I have to shut that all out. Because my alarm is going to go off at 4 am, I need to be in the hospital at 5 am and I go on call at 6 am . . . I'll get off again sometime after 6pm on Sunday. That's a 36 hours in the hospital. 24 of them responsible for all the burn, plastics, vascular and neurosurgery patients in the hospital and an additional 12 in charge of just the burn patients. It's my first call as a grown up a doctor. I really need my subconscious to settle down so I can get a few hours sleep.
No comments:
Post a Comment