Long time...

It's been a long time since I wrote on this blog. I think I got overwhelmed with intern year and was too tired out to blog. In the last two years since I've written a lot has happened. Professionally, in my intern year I finished the year strong, winning two awards, one given by the nursing staff and one given by the medical students. My second year of training didn't go as well though. In retrospect, my weaknesses stemmed from lack of confidence in the operating room and lack of efficiency in seeing consults, etc. The third year of training is going better in my opinion, but I haven't had my annual review yet. I have gotten more efficient and I think that I am more confident in the operating room these days. I truly enjoy being in the operating room and I am now comfortable working with many of the attending surgeons where I used to be nervous around them...

Currently, I am doing a rotation at a community hospital in a city 30 minutes away from where I live. We rotate through this hospital for a month as interns and then we spend half of our third year of training at the hospital. It's an amazing experience this year but very tough. We are on overnight call every 4th night and we get tons of consults and operative experience. The hospital is also a level one trauma center and we get multiple trauma admissions every day. Thank goodness we have a lot of help from Physicians Assistants, who work with the surgical residents in rounding and taking care of all the trauma patients.

I was last on call on Friday, Dec 19th. I started tracking how many pages I got on this rotation while on call and on Friday I got 58 pages during the day. The most pages I ever got was 110 pages in a 24 hour period, so this wasn't bad. I also did 5 surgeries during call, including two surgeries that I'd never done before (surprisingly) which were debridement of necrotizing fasciitis and a trauma splenectomy. The most memorable moment of the night was when I performed a rectal exam on a totally drunk guy who had been hit by a car. After the exam he started yelling:

"Someone just violated my anal butt!"
"Whoever just did that is going to pay for it! 100%!"

The entire trauma team was giggling for the next hour about it...

Look for another post some time after my next call.

Next call: Monday, Dec 22nd.