Week one

So far, so good.

I'm sure my radio silence made more than one of you wonder if maybe, just maybe, my patients and I hadn't actually made it through my first week as a doctor. But, so far, so good.

As I was leaving the parking garage tonight, I was actually thinking about just how much I've learned in the last week. Five days ago, I called a resident to ask if I could give a patient Tylenol. Yesterday, I got an abnormal lab result, adjusted a patient's anticoagulation, and casually mentioned it to the attending a couple hours later.

I was on call this weekend. While I wouldn't describe that as the best 30 hours of my life, it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it might be. There was a moment at the end there when I thought my head might blow right off my shoulders if I had to answer one more page. But then, two of the three pagers I was carrying went off, and my head somehow managed to stay attached. I think it was just too damn tired to catapult itself from my neck.

I was sort of hoping I'd have some interesting patient stories to tell...
They called a code on one of my fellow interns on Saturday morning. (I suppose that's interesting, eh?) It was a hell of a way to start call. The poor guy had a seizure and then stopped breathing. The surgery team that responded to the code looked at him, lying on the floor in the medicine team room, still a little blue, and said, "Wow. And we thought our rounds were tough."

The intern is fine now. He was up walking the halls on Saturday night in scrub pants and a gown, letting himself into the supply room with his badge so he could steal more toiletries. Today, he was back at work, covering patients in between having an MRI and an EEG. Apparently, there's no rest for the shaky.