Oh how I love my medicine rotation...

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xanthomondo

xanthomondo

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...I mean, where else do you have the opportunity to save lives 1 fax at a time?

:thumbdown:
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hahaha. Well if you have yet to do surgery I suggest doing the hardest rotation possible to get a taste of what residency is like. Seriously you will have no life outside of going to the hospital and going home to go to sleep. Lifestyle probably doesn't seem that big of a deal now but when you lose it you'll miss it and it'll seem way more important.

Also, surgery residency has this air about it of being cool. I thought the same thing. However, once you do it that feeling will go away. In the future I will feel sorry for the people on that rotation. The only people who think they are cool because they are surgeons are... surgeons. It's not like general surgery is hard to match into at all. People who aren't surgeons chose not to be, not because they couldn't do it. If you like surgery just for the procedure orientated nature of it I would highly suggest considering other procedure oriented careers with better lifestyles such as urology, ophtho, certain IM subspecialties, EM, interventional rads, ENT, etc. Gen surg, Neuro surg, Ortho (residency anyway) and even some plastics surg are all very taxing and time consuming to get anywhere in the field and in my opinion are not worth the sacrifices you'll need to make to your own life. Don't have such an ego thinking you are badass because you are "surgery" because I promise you that no one cares expect you...
 
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officedepot said:
hahaha. Well if you have yet to do surgery I suggest doing the hardest rotation possible to get a taste of what residency is like. Seriously you will have no life outside of going to the hospital and going home to go to sleep. Lifestyle probably doesn't seem that big of a deal now but when you lose it you'll miss it and it'll seem way more important.

Also, surgery residency has this air about it of being cool. I thought the same thing. However, once you do it that feeling will go away. In the future I will feel sorry for the people on that rotation. The only people who think they are cool because they are surgeons are... surgeons. It's not like general surgery is hard to match into at all. People who aren't surgeons chose not to be, not because they couldn't do it. If you like surgery just for the procedure orientated nature of it I would highly suggest considering other procedure oriented careers with better lifestyles such as urology, ophtho, certain IM subspecialties, EM, interventional rads, ENT, etc. Gen surg, Neuro surg, Ortho (residency anyway) and even some plastics surg are all very taxing and time consuming to get anywhere in the field and in my opinion are not worth the sacrifices you'll need to make to your own life. Don't have such an ego thinking you are badass because you are "surgery" because I promise you that no one cares expect you...
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I **** no I'd never consider surgery :laugh:

That **** was miserable as well. Medicine had the potential to be a cool rotation (and it was for the last month) but this new month has sucked the life out of me. I now realize how pathetic hospitals are and how grossly inefficient the entire system is and how much patients suffer because the system is so ****ing ******ed.

I also realize what a joke/oxymoron the term "medical education" is. Standing there during rounds and watching the attending write notes is not doing me any good. I also love how I have to stick around so that I can *run the list* but when we get to patient #2 on the list I'm immediately asked to do something ******ed like get a fax, etc so that I end up missing the all important running of the list.
 
it's 1500 on a post-call day last August, i've been in the hospital since 0530 the previous morning, on-call on IM at a county hospital. slept from 0500 - 0625 when my pager woke me up to pre-round. hellish call; started off w/ 18 patients on our list (cap at 20) got called on 22 patients over the course of 24 hours, admitted 12 to the ICU (which still went to our team along with most of the others, these don't count for the cap).

so i'm about to leave to go home to sleep before coming back the next day, when the intern says, "I need you to do one more thing for the team, just call X hospital and have them fax over the results of Mrs. Y's stress test." I die a little bit inside. Go consent the patient, call the outside hospital, finally reach someone, who says, "Yes we can do that." hang up..

waiting.. waiting.. no fax.

Call again.. "Did it not go through? Okay I'll send it again.." waiting.... ask the charge nurse in the ICU if she can put it in the chart when the fax comes through since i haven't showered in 36 hours, she smiles, "No, that's your job."

Ten feet away a pt with leukomoid meningitis is screaming at the top of her lungs. I'm sure she's in a lot of pain.. I've been listening to her scream for the past 30 hours. Nothing to be done. Still screaming. Still waiting.

5 o'clock rolls around, I'm dying here.. but I still have this lingering feeling of, "Gotta do this for the team, for the patient.." I hear the fax machine start making whatever the **** noise it makes.. it warms up.. and the stress test comes through, 1 page every 2 minutes, for all 25 pages.

Next day, new attending, never even looks at the stress test.. pt discharged home. Haha. def a low point of med school for me.
 
coldweatherblue said:
it's 1500 on a post-call day last August, i've been in the hospital since 0530 the previous morning, on-call on IM at a county hospital. slept from 0500 - 0625 when my pager woke me up to pre-round. hellish call; started off w/ 18 patients on our list (cap at 20) got called on 22 patients over the course of 24 hours, admitted 12 to the ICU (which still went to our team along with most of the others, these don't count for the cap).

so i'm about to leave to go home to sleep before coming back the next day, when the intern says, "I need you to do one more thing for the team, just call X hospital and have them fax over the results of Mrs. Y's stress test." I die a little bit inside. Go consent the patient, call the outside hospital, finally reach someone, who says, "Yes we can do that." hang up..

waiting.. waiting.. no fax.

Call again.. "Did it not go through? Okay I'll send it again.." waiting.... ask the charge nurse in the ICU if she can put it in the chart when the fax comes through since i haven't showered in 36 hours, she smiles, "No, that's your job."

Ten feet away a pt with leukomoid meningitis is screaming at the top of her lungs. I'm sure she's in a lot of pain.. I've been listening to her scream for the past 30 hours. Nothing to be done. Still screaming. Still waiting.

5 o'clock rolls around, I'm dying here.. but I still have this lingering feeling of, "Gotta do this for the team, for the patient.." I hear the fax machine start making whatever the **** noise it makes.. it warms up.. and the stress test comes through, 1 page every 2 minutes, for all 25 pages.

Next day, new attending, never even looks at the stress test.. pt discharged home. Haha. def a low point of med school for me.
Click to expand...

:laugh:
 
coldweatherblue said:
it's 1500 on a post-call day last August, i've been in the hospital since 0530 the previous morning, on-call on IM at a county hospital. slept from 0500 - 0625 when my pager woke me up to pre-round. hellish call; started off w/ 18 patients on our list (cap at 20) got called on 22 patients over the course of 24 hours, admitted 12 to the ICU (which still went to our team along with most of the others, these don't count for the cap).

so i'm about to leave to go home to sleep before coming back the next day, when the intern says, "I need you to do one more thing for the team, just call X hospital and have them fax over the results of Mrs. Y's stress test." I die a little bit inside. Go consent the patient, call the outside hospital, finally reach someone, who says, "Yes we can do that." hang up..

waiting.. waiting.. no fax.

Call again.. "Did it not go through? Okay I'll send it again.." waiting.... ask the charge nurse in the ICU if she can put it in the chart when the fax comes through since i haven't showered in 36 hours, she smiles, "No, that's your job."

Ten feet away a pt with leukomoid meningitis is screaming at the top of her lungs. I'm sure she's in a lot of pain.. I've been listening to her scream for the past 30 hours. Nothing to be done. Still screaming. Still waiting.

5 o'clock rolls around, I'm dying here.. but I still have this lingering feeling of, "Gotta do this for the team, for the patient.." I hear the fax machine start making whatever the **** noise it makes.. it warms up.. and the stress test comes through, 1 page every 2 minutes, for all 25 pages.

Next day, new attending, never even looks at the stress test.. pt discharged home. Haha. def a low point of med school for me.
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I just died a little when I read that...I'm sorry
 
hahaha, you guys are so sympathetic. probably a sick sense of humor but now i always laugh about that IM call-from-hell.. my favorite is the charge nurse's face when she turns around like, "who the **** is this stupid med student and why is he talking to me?". livin the dream.. :laugh:

just say no to faxes!
 
officedepot said:
hahaha. Well if you have yet to do surgery I suggest doing the hardest rotation possible to get a taste of what residency is like. Seriously you will have no life outside of going to the hospital and going home to go to sleep. Lifestyle probably doesn't seem that big of a deal now but when you lose it you'll miss it and it'll seem way more important.

Also, surgery residency has this air about it of being cool. I thought the same thing. However, once you do it that feeling will go away. In the future I will feel sorry for the people on that rotation. The only people who think they are cool because they are surgeons are... surgeons. It's not like general surgery is hard to match into at all. People who aren't surgeons chose not to be, not because they couldn't do it. If you like surgery just for the procedure orientated nature of it I would highly suggest considering other procedure oriented careers with better lifestyles such as urology, ophtho, certain IM subspecialties, EM, interventional rads, ENT, etc. Gen surg, Neuro surg, Ortho (residency anyway) and even some plastics surg are all very taxing and time consuming to get anywhere in the field and in my opinion are not worth the sacrifices you'll need to make to your own life. Don't have such an ego thinking you are badass because you are "surgery" because I promise you that no one cares expect you...
Click to expand...

I'm trying really hard to find the relevance of this post to the OP.
 
officedepot said:
hahaha. Well if you have yet to do surgery I suggest doing the hardest rotation possible to get a taste of what residency is like. Seriously you will have no life outside of going to the hospital and going home to go to sleep. Lifestyle probably doesn't seem that big of a deal now but when you lose it you'll miss it and it'll seem way more important.

Also, surgery residency has this air about it of being cool. I thought the same thing. However, once you do it that feeling will go away. In the future I will feel sorry for the people on that rotation. The only people who think they are cool because they are surgeons are... surgeons. It's not like general surgery is hard to match into at all. People who aren't surgeons chose not to be, not because they couldn't do it. If you like surgery just for the procedure orientated nature of it I would highly suggest considering other procedure oriented careers with better lifestyles such as urology, ophtho, certain IM subspecialties, EM, interventional rads, ENT, etc. Gen surg, Neuro surg, Ortho (residency anyway) and even some plastics surg are all very taxing and time consuming to get anywhere in the field and in my opinion are not worth the sacrifices you'll need to make to your own life. Don't have such an ego thinking you are badass because you are "surgery" because I promise you that no one cares expect you...
Click to expand...

cool
 
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MedStudentWanna said:
I'm trying really hard to find the relevance of this post to the OP.
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haha well I was tired and I was thinking the OP was dissing IM as being boring and was thinking you actually save lives in surgery with your hands or some bs and that IM guys only fax and write notes... So yeah...
 
xanthomondo said:
...I mean, where else do you have the opportunity to save lives 1 fax at a time?

:thumbdown:
Click to expand...

In b4 shut in radiologist guy appears.

Medicine is alpha brah. U mad cardiologists and GI docs are stylin? Pulmonary is alpha too
 
I used to call people out that said they went into medicine not for the prestige or money, but to help their fellow man.

But then I saw that GI was super competitive, and I realized the err of my ways. Clearly this is where one goes when they have a passion to elevate the human condition. Silly me.

The only thing that makes me scratch my head is Peds. Shouldn't all these helpers of man be leaping with all the vigor they could muster towards saving babies? I mean, who would rather help a 60 yr old than a 3 yr old?

It's a real brain teaser.
 
coldweatherblue said:
Call again.. "Did it not go through? Okay I'll send it again.." waiting.... ask the charge nurse in the ICU if she can put it in the chart when the fax comes through since i haven't showered in 36 hours, she smiles, "No, that's your job."
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I can exactly picture this happening. Afterwards, the nurse probably took her 10th break of the day and spent another hour arguing with other nurses what days she wants off next month.

Lazy nurses who refuse to do anything outside of their "job description" really piss me off. Hell, there have been many times where I do their job because the patient has been waiting 2+ hours (for something as simple as a basin of soapy water to clean themselves) and when I go looking for the nurse she was in the break room arguing how she needed off all of these days. "Oh yeah, I'm getting Mrs Patient that now..." as she continues to sit in the room....I finally said screw it, tell me where it is and I'll get it.
 
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I would say my most annoying fax story is when a patient came in for a NSTEMI (im on a cards team as my general medicine rotation). He was stable, stented, stepped down from the CCU, and ready to go. Attending says "we need his GI records from OSH in order to discharge him to make sure everything's good".

MEDICAL STUDENT TO THE RESCUE! It wasn't even a patient I was covering or knew anything about, so I get the little release form, go into his room. "Mr Patient? When were you at this OSH for a GI problem?" Pt replies that he was there 2 months ago. Great! I get him to sign the form

I call the OSH, they confirm said dates, I get the fax number, I fax my paper over. Wait....1 hour later I call back.

"Hi, umm, I didn't receive my fax back?"

"Uhh, we didn't get any requests from your hospital"

"I faxed it to <this number>"

"I don't know where you got that number from, but thats no where near our number...fax it to here"

*Resends fax*

1 hour later....still no faxed received. I call back.

"Well, uhh, the lady who usually does the medical records faxing is out today. I don't know what happened to your request, but resend it and I'll take care of it"

*resends fax*

1 hour later still no fax

"Umm, I'm not sure who picked up your fax, but I'm the only one in the office now, I'm standing right next to the fax machine....send it to me and I'll take care of it"

*Resends fax*

I FINALLY RECEIVE THE FAX BACK....take it to the team to show them that he was admitted for gastroenteritis and dehydration and was fixed up nicely and discharged. All of his GI notes were there.

"No this isn't what we wanted...we needed his operative report for his partial gastrectomy that was done in 2005"

"Oh well, we'll just discharge him anyway."

+pissed+
 
xanthomondo said:
I would say my most annoying fax story is when a patient came in for a NSTEMI (im on a cards team as my general medicine rotation). He was stable, stented, stepped down from the CCU, and ready to go. Attending says "we need his GI records from OSH in order to discharge him to make sure everything's good".

MEDICAL STUDENT TO THE RESCUE! It wasn't even a patient I was covering or knew anything about, so I get the little release form, go into his room. "Mr Patient? When were you at this OSH for a GI problem?" Pt replies that he was there 2 months ago. Great! I get him to sign the form

I call the OSH, they confirm said dates, I get the fax number, I fax my paper over. Wait....1 hour later I call back.

"Hi, umm, I didn't receive my fax back?"

"Uhh, we didn't get any requests from your hospital"

"I faxed it to <this number>"

"I don't know where you got that number from, but thats no where near our number...fax it to here"

*Resends fax*

1 hour later....still no faxed received. I call back.

"Well, uhh, the lady who usually does the medical records faxing is out today. I don't know what happened to your request, but resend it and I'll take care of it"

*resends fax*

1 hour later still no fax

"Umm, I'm not sure who picked up your fax, but I'm the only one in the office now, I'm standing right next to the fax machine....send it to me and I'll take care of it"

*Resends fax*

I FINALLY RECEIVE THE FAX BACK....take it to the team to show them that he was admitted for gastroenteritis and dehydration and was fixed up nicely and discharged. All of his GI notes were there.

"No this isn't what we wanted...we needed his operative report for his partial gastrectomy that was done in 2005"

"Oh well, we'll just discharge him anyway."

+pissed+
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Oh my good god that would probably give me an aneurysm. I'm sorry man.

This is just further proof that hospital inefficiency is an epidemic; and they wonder why they often hemorrhage money all over the place and then can't explain why they've got all numbers in the red at the end of the quarter.
 
don't you guys have clerks or 'business associates' to look out for faxes and put them in charts? That's their job. I had to suffer through some bull**** fax stuff too but my job consisted on getting consent and calling it over. After that I tell the clerk/BA to look out for it and to put it in a chart. It is not and should not be a medical student's job to sit and wait for a fax when they pay people to do that.
 
SuperHiro said:
don't you guys have clerks or 'business associates' to look out for faxes and put them in charts? That's their job. I had to suffer through some bull**** fax stuff too but my job consisted on getting consent and calling it over. After that I tell the clerk/BA to look out for it and to put it in a chart. It is not and should not be a medical student's job to sit and wait for a fax when they pay people to do that.
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Well each floor has a unit secretary, but all they really do is put charts together when a patient gets admitted to their floor. If you were to ask them to look out for your fax you would probably get stabbed. Seriously, I've gotten really, really nasty responses from them when I asked them for the four digit code to the copy machine so that I could copy a page of the patient's chart for my team.

Then again, everyone in the hospital I'm at now is a miserable piece of ****, which is probably why it's making me miserable. 1 more week left!
 
officedepot said:
hahaha. Well if you have yet to do surgery I suggest doing the hardest rotation possible to get a taste of what residency is like. Seriously you will have no life outside of going to the hospital and going home to go to sleep. Lifestyle probably doesn't seem that big of a deal now but when you lose it you'll miss it and it'll seem way more important.

Also, surgery residency has this air about it of being cool. I thought the same thing. However, once you do it that feeling will go away. In the future I will feel sorry for the people on that rotation. The only people who think they are cool because they are surgeons are... surgeons. It's not like general surgery is hard to match into at all. People who aren't surgeons chose not to be, not because they couldn't do it. If you like surgery just for the procedure orientated nature of it I would highly suggest considering other procedure oriented careers with better lifestyles such as urology, ophtho, certain IM subspecialties, EM, interventional rads, ENT, etc. Gen surg, Neuro surg, Ortho (residency anyway) and even some plastics surg are all very taxing and time consuming to get anywhere in the field and in my opinion are not worth the sacrifices you'll need to make to your own life. Don't have such an ego thinking you are badass because you are "surgery" because I promise you that no one cares expect you...
Click to expand...

Sounds like somebody got a little butt hurt because they didn't get enough hugs on their surgery rotation...
 
coldweatherblue said:
hahaha, you guys are so sympathetic. probably a sick sense of humor but now i always laugh about that IM call-from-hell.. my favorite is the charge nurse's face when she turns around like, "who the **** is this stupid med student and why is he talking to me?". livin the dream.. :laugh:

just say no to faxes!
Click to expand...

I can't even begin to understand your pain.

We never have to do any scut work like faxing

We don't have overnight call for IM

After overnight call on Surgery, the latest we stayed post-call is 1 or 2.

I hope this was an isolated incident and not indicative of your entire experience
 
So today I had lectures/other mandatory stuff that took the students off of the floors for the morning. Finally got back to my intern at 2pm. The first thing he says to me?

"Great! You're back! We have the patient in room 52 who is spanish speaking only. He had recent work done at these two hospitals and we need his medical record faxed over. Here's a blank consent form to fill out."

+pissed++pissed++pissed++pissed++pissed++pissed+
 
xanthomondo said:
Well each floor has a unit secretary, but all they really do is put charts together when a patient gets admitted to their floor. If you were to ask them to look out for your fax you would probably get stabbed. Seriously, I've gotten really, really nasty responses from them when I asked them for the four digit code to the copy machine so that I could copy a page of the patient's chart for my team.

Then again, everyone in the hospital I'm at now is a miserable piece of ****, which is probably why it's making me miserable. 1 more week left!
Click to expand...

Yeah god forbid the unit secretaries do their jobs... sometimes I wonder if med students are just an excuse for slave labor
 
:laugh: I stumbled upon this thread and laughed

I get to revisit medicine at the same hospital (for my last rotation in med school!) in a month

Can't wait!!!
 
ArcGurren said:
Yeah god forbid the unit secretaries do their jobs... sometimes I wonder if med students are just an excuse for slave labor
Click to expand...

I think that unit secretaries are generally miserable. I'm not sure that it gets much better when you get any letters behind your name. Somehow they think it's their job to have a biting comment to any simple request. The best unit secretaries I've found are pre-meds, b/c they know that they're probably not stuck as unit secretaries for the rest of their lives.
 
coldweatherblue said:
it's 1500 on a post-call day last August, i've been in the hospital since 0530 the previous morning, on-call on IM at a county hospital. slept from 0500 - 0625 when my pager woke me up to pre-round. hellish call; started off w/ 18 patients on our list (cap at 20) got called on 22 patients over the course of 24 hours, admitted 12 to the ICU (which still went to our team along with most of the others, these don't count for the cap).

so i'm about to leave to go home to sleep before coming back the next day, when the intern says, "I need you to do one more thing for the team, just call X hospital and have them fax over the results of Mrs. Y's stress test." I die a little bit inside. Go consent the patient, call the outside hospital, finally reach someone, who says, "Yes we can do that." hang up..

waiting.. waiting.. no fax.

Call again.. "Did it not go through? Okay I'll send it again.." waiting.... ask the charge nurse in the ICU if she can put it in the chart when the fax comes through since i haven't showered in 36 hours, she smiles, "No, that's your job."

Ten feet away a pt with leukomoid meningitis is screaming at the top of her lungs. I'm sure she's in a lot of pain.. I've been listening to her scream for the past 30 hours. Nothing to be done. Still screaming. Still waiting.

5 o'clock rolls around, I'm dying here.. but I still have this lingering feeling of, "Gotta do this for the team, for the patient.." I hear the fax machine start making whatever the **** noise it makes.. it warms up.. and the stress test comes through, 1 page every 2 minutes, for all 25 pages.

Next day, new attending, never even looks at the stress test.. pt discharged home. Haha. def a low point of med school for me.
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:laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh:

I realize this is from last May, but this may be the funniest thing I've read on SDN, including the wonderful "Funniest chief complaints" thread.
 
That's messed up that the clerks are being such bastards about dealing with faxes. I worked as a clerk for 1.5 years before med school and a quarter of my job was faxing stuff/getting stuff faxed over. If I wasn't doing it then the nurses did. How does that become a medical students job??
 
MRSAful Fate said:
That's messed up that the clerks are being such bastards about dealing with faxes. I worked as a clerk for 1.5 years before med school and a quarter of my job was faxing stuff/getting stuff faxed over. If I wasn't doing it then the nurses did. How does that become a medical students job??
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when med students basically get forced to do that kinda crap...
 
coldweatherblue said:
it's 1500 on a post-call day last August, i've been in the hospital since 0530 the previous morning, on-call on IM at a county hospital. slept from 0500 - 0625 when my pager woke me up to pre-round. hellish call; started off w/ 18 patients on our list (cap at 20) got called on 22 patients over the course of 24 hours, admitted 12 to the ICU (which still went to our team along with most of the others, these don't count for the cap).

so i'm about to leave to go home to sleep before coming back the next day, when the intern says, "I need you to do one more thing for the team, just call X hospital and have them fax over the results of Mrs. Y's stress test." I die a little bit inside. Go consent the patient, call the outside hospital, finally reach someone, who says, "Yes we can do that." hang up..

waiting.. waiting.. no fax.

Call again.. "Did it not go through? Okay I'll send it again.." waiting.... ask the charge nurse in the ICU if she can put it in the chart when the fax comes through since i haven't showered in 36 hours, she smiles, "No, that's your job."

Ten feet away a pt with leukomoid meningitis is screaming at the top of her lungs. I'm sure she's in a lot of pain.. I've been listening to her scream for the past 30 hours. Nothing to be done. Still screaming. Still waiting.

5 o'clock rolls around, I'm dying here.. but I still have this lingering feeling of, "Gotta do this for the team, for the patient.." I hear the fax machine start making whatever the **** noise it makes.. it warms up.. and the stress test comes through, 1 page every 2 minutes, for all 25 pages.

Next day, new attending, never even looks at the stress test.. pt discharged home. Haha. def a low point of med school for me.
Click to expand...

Mother Effin Boss.

Mad props for this beast of a post. Summarizes third year for me along with this video from UPENN

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5Zc3b9Y1Os

along with the following ctrl-v = Copyright(c) 2006 USMLE WORLD, Please do not save, print, cut, copy or paste anything while USMLE WORLD is running. Thanks!!
 
coldweatherblue said:
it's 1500 on a post-call day last August, i've been in the hospital since 0530 the previous morning, on-call on IM at a county hospital. slept from 0500 - 0625 when my pager woke me up to pre-round. hellish call; started off w/ 18 patients on our list (cap at 20) got called on 22 patients over the course of 24 hours, admitted 12 to the ICU (which still went to our team along with most of the others, these don't count for the cap).

so i'm about to leave to go home to sleep before coming back the next day, when the intern says, "I need you to do one more thing for the team, just call X hospital and have them fax over the results of Mrs. Y's stress test." I die a little bit inside. Go consent the patient, call the outside hospital, finally reach someone, who says, "Yes we can do that." hang up..

waiting.. waiting.. no fax.

Call again.. "Did it not go through? Okay I'll send it again.." waiting.... ask the charge nurse in the ICU if she can put it in the chart when the fax comes through since i haven't showered in 36 hours, she smiles, "No, that's your job."

Ten feet away a pt with leukomoid meningitis is screaming at the top of her lungs. I'm sure she's in a lot of pain.. I've been listening to her scream for the past 30 hours. Nothing to be done. Still screaming. Still waiting.

5 o'clock rolls around, I'm dying here.. but I still have this lingering feeling of, "Gotta do this for the team, for the patient.." I hear the fax machine start making whatever the **** noise it makes.. it warms up.. and the stress test comes through, 1 page every 2 minutes, for all 25 pages.

Next day, new attending, never even looks at the stress test.. pt discharged home. Haha. def a low point of med school for me.
Click to expand...

You have a talent. Ever thought of collecting all your anecdotes an writing a book? With a good title, a nice cover and proper maketing, I bet many premeds and meds students would buy it (or download it for free fom some P2P site).
 
coldweatherblue said:
it's 1500 on a post-call day last August, i've been in the hospital since 0530 the previous morning, on-call on IM at a county hospital. slept from 0500 - 0625 when my pager woke me up to pre-round. hellish call; started off w/ 18 patients on our list (cap at 20) got called on 22 patients over the course of 24 hours, admitted 12 to the ICU (which still went to our team along with most of the others, these don't count for the cap).

so i'm about to leave to go home to sleep before coming back the next day, when the intern says, "I need you to do one more thing for the team, just call X hospital and have them fax over the results of Mrs. Y's stress test." I die a little bit inside. Go consent the patient, call the outside hospital, finally reach someone, who says, "Yes we can do that." hang up..

waiting.. waiting.. no fax.

Call again.. "Did it not go through? Okay I'll send it again.." waiting.... ask the charge nurse in the ICU if she can put it in the chart when the fax comes through since i haven't showered in 36 hours, she smiles, "No, that's your job."

Ten feet away a pt with leukomoid meningitis is screaming at the top of her lungs. I'm sure she's in a lot of pain.. I've been listening to her scream for the past 30 hours. Nothing to be done. Still screaming. Still waiting.

5 o'clock rolls around, I'm dying here.. but I still have this lingering feeling of, "Gotta do this for the team, for the patient.." I hear the fax machine start making whatever the **** noise it makes.. it warms up.. and the stress test comes through, 1 page every 2 minutes, for all 25 pages.

Next day, new attending, never even looks at the stress test.. pt discharged home. Haha. def a low point of med school for me.
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