So this past Friday marked my last day on the first of three sections in my Internal Medicine rotation. I really am glad that I started off the way I did because I basically didn’t have to interact with residents; it was just me and the attending. This really allowed the attending to teach me one on one and I got to see what Outpatient internal medicine was like without the evil influence of mean residents that don’t teach and Q4 call schedules. My next rotation is at the County Hospital and I am really excited. That hospital is notorious for giving you the best training not because there are better attendings, but because they are so understaffed that you take on a lot more responsibility than what you would have at the main LLU medical center. I was told that you almost really act as a intern of Internal Medicine which is pretty cool. I know that there will be sucky parts to the experience, but I’ve already seen that Internal Medicine can be fun, so I will take the good with the bad.
So far I can’t say that I want to change my future specialty to Internal Medicine, but from my experiences this past month, I definitely don’t mind the specialty at all. I really like the ability to sit down and talk with my patients and get into their world a little bit, and I like the intellectual challenges of working through their extensive history and figuring out what is wrong with them, and even more (what seperates us from nurses) how to manage their care. With all that said, I do believe that I can experience medicine in other fields too, so I am going to go into all the other specialties with a truly open mind.
My wife and I are both going to be at the County Hospital and our call days are back to back. So lets say that she was on call on Monday…we would both get to the hospital on Monday morning around 5:45 a.m. to pre-round like regular. I would then leave probably by about 7:00 p.m. that day, while my wife would not leave the hospital till around 11:00 a.m. on Tuesday. On Tuesday though, I would be coming in at 5:45 a.m. again to pre-round and staying until 11:00 a.m. on Wednesday. So there will kind of be a nice little span where we may not see each other. I don’t forsee this causing any terrible problems, but we really haven’t gone that long without seeing each other since we have been married so it will certainly be a new experience.
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