So annoying

[ocean11]

have you guys ever had to wait 3 hours AFTER you saw your last patient b/c your residents can't be bothered to have you present it to them and are busy with something else?!?! man, today is Saturday, i have dinner plans and finished my last H&P 3.5 hours ago!!! I presented to my intern, but he wants me to present to the senior and when I called her she told me to wait... that was 3 hours ago......... so annoying..... I might not get out of here at all....... *(&*(&^*(&(*&(*&*(& please share your stories.... this sucks being at the hospital alone on a saturday night... when u're supposed to have a short call arghghghghghg

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[Bertelman]

At least you've got SDN...peruse the Pre-Allo forums. There's always some interesting stuff there, and they LOVE cynical med student replies.

 

[Hard24Get]

have you guys ever had to wait 3 hours AFTER you saw your last patient b/c your residents can't be bothered to have you present it to them and are busy with something else?!?! man, today is Saturday, i have dinner plans and finished my last H&P 3.5 hours ago!!! I presented to my intern, but he wants me to present to the senior and when I called her she told me to wait... that was 3 hours ago......... so annoying..... I might not get out of here at all....... *(&*(&^*(&(*&(*&*(& please share your stories.... this sucks being at the hospital alone on a saturday night... when u're supposed to have a short call arghghghghghg

Whe I a waiting for my resident for something I generally text page them to see if they need any help. If they need help, I have something to do while I am waiting and am actually being useful. If they feel there is nothing I can do to help, generally they feel bad, do what they have to do with me, and let me go.

I have yet to be told "there is nothing you can do. Continue to wait for me."

 

[ocean11]

Whe I a waiting for my resident for something I generally text page them to see if they need any help. If they need help, I have something to do while I am waiting and am actually being useful. If they feel there is nothing I can do to help, generally they feel bad, do what they have to do with me, and let me go.

I have yet to be told "there is nothing you can do. Continue to wait for me."

just took your advice.... paged all 3 of them.... Hi Dr XYZ, do u need help with anything? (we have text pagers here).... please PLEASE send me home...a rghghghghghghgh my last team was cake... I would come in at 7:20am and leave by 3pm at the latest... on weekends I would leave at 12pm....

No pages yet.... will keep u updated (if anyone cares that is...)

 

[ocean11]

OK so I paged all 3 residents (2 interns and 1 senior) and finally called one of the interns and he came upstairs at 6:10pm and basically told me that we have no patients and to go home and just to check in with the senior, so GET THIS: I call the senior and tell her I did x, y and z and since there is no patients I'm going home. She said "Oh I thought you were excited to do H&P's" and I was like "Yeah but there are no patients" so she told me there was a patient in the ER, and I'm like, yeah I'll totally do it.... and she was like 'nah thats ok go home, I'll see you Monday" in this real biatc&y tone.... So I left at 6:30pm... with a sinking feeling that my eval is going to hell.... now I have to make up for this and work harder....

*(& I thought IM was going to be an awsome rotation, but it really REALLY is not! I don't like my senior, the hours on my new team arn't that good! and we have 1 bipolar student with us.... and oh lets not forget the HEP C needle stick!!!!

Can this get any worse?!?!?!?! I kinda miss surgery....

 

[RockShox]

I have to say that I was not more than 5 days into IM before I thought I would cut out my eyes. I had very similar experiences (except the needle stick)

Two choice memories include...

The day where I spent the whole day and night picking my ear in the student lounge waiting for something to do and then just five minutes before our shift officially ended I get a call from the resident to come to the hospital because he wanted us all to listen to some didactics for the next hour or so. WE HAVE BEEN SITTING ON OUR ASSES ALL DAY AND YOU CHOOSE NOW TO DO THIS! just when I am about to go home. And how useful it was! half the time was spent watching the residents try to remember how to interpret acid/base status.

The second is another night just before I my shift ended (I am seeing a trend) were the intern is like "Hey we are about to do a central line you want to do surgery you can stay and watch if you want but if not its cool too." (translation don't even think of leaving unless you want to be a GP for the rest of your life). So I of course got to "watch" and some how I end up being the one putting traction on the head helping the resident placing the line, while the intern suddenly disappears to go "check on a patient or something". umm bulls**t! The kicker is that it took over and 1 1/2 hours to place the line with U/S. I am thinking the whole time, "We do entire hysterectomies in this amount of time just call a surgeon!"

Anyway, I spent another month at another hospital and figured out it was not IM that bugged me as much as that IM team. (Well this is only partially true because I discovered that all my IM teams seemed to have ability to talk about patients for days on end and never really make any definite decisions about how to care for them)

You will make it through somehow. Let us know how it turns out.

 

[Hard24Get]

Yeah, the trick of my strategy is not to deviate with anyone. You should have asked the senior if they needed anything or if there was anyone to see before saying you were going home. Bring her an article relevant to the H&P you did on Monday to make anouther inroad.
I also liked Surgery better than Medicine because there is just too much game playing and BS sometimes on the floors. You just have to play along, unfortunately, and spend the down time on SDN or, even better, studing for your shelf. When you do your Sub-I and don't have a shelf, you will be busier and not as much at the mercy of others. I feel your pain!

OK so I paged all 3 residents (2 interns and 1 senior) and finally called one of the interns and he came upstairs at 6:10pm and basically told me that we have no patients and to go home and just to check in with the senior, so GET THIS: I call the senior and tell her I did x, y and z and since there is no patients I'm going home. She said "Oh I thought you were excited to do H&P's" and I was like "Yeah but there are no patients" so she told me there was a patient in the ER, and I'm like, yeah I'll totally do it.... and she was like 'nah thats ok go home, I'll see you Monday" in this real biatc&y tone.... So I left at 6:30pm... with a sinking feeling that my eval is going to hell.... now I have to make up for this and work harder....

*(& I thought IM was going to be an awsome rotation, but it really REALLY is not! I don't like my senior, the hours on my new team arn't that good! and we have 1 bipolar student with us.... and oh lets not forget the HEP C needle stick!!!!

Can this get any worse?!?!?!?! I kinda miss surgery....

 

[pillowhead]

I have yet to be told "there is nothing you can do. Continue to wait for me."

I have. Over and over and over and over again when I was on my medicine sub-I (sorry, it doesn't necessarily get better in 4th year). As a sub-I, it's not like you have to check in with the interns even so you're totally at the mercy of the resident. There's only so many times you can page a resident saying I'm done, short call is over so there can't possibly be any more patients, and mine are all tucked away. He always liked to look at blood smears at the end of the day as a team so we all had to wait while his inefficient butt finished up his work before we could all go home. And he refused to delegate out his tasks. He started telling me I should help out the interns more and while I was got along with the interns well and generally did help them out with stuff if they needed it, the whole point of beign a sub-I is that you're supposed to act like an intern! (And interns don't routinely check in with each other every single day before leaving unless someone is overwhelmed and the other person is has lighter workload.)

Medicine is by far the most team-dependent rotation. Over 3rd and 4th year, I had two awesome general medicine teams and two general medicien teams from hell. Based on the first two, it made me want to do IM. Based on the last two, it made me want to do pathology. (I ended up in Anesthesiology which you could say is somewhere in between the two i suppose).

 

[missmod]

During my medicine rotation, I tried really hard to do everything it was that my OWN patients needed (consults, procedures, orders, etc), stayed busy when there were things to do, so that when I was done with my work, I could say to my resident -- "hey i'm done with my work. can i go home?" In all seriousness, I phrased my question exactly like this and it never hurt my evals once.

Also, if ANYBODY ever offered me the opportunity to go home, i took it and ran! (Take the back stairs out of the hospital so you don't run into another team member who will offer you a new admit or new procedure). I don't think interns/residents necessarily care if you stay to watch a random procedure (i mean once you've seen one paracentesis, you've seen them all). I think most of them mean it when they say "I don't care if you stay to watch or go."

 

[Tired]

GET THIS: I call the senior and tell her I did x, y and z and since there is no patients I'm going home. She said "Oh I thought you were excited to do H&P's" . . .

I hate that. Hey stupid resident, why the f*ck would anyone be "excited" to do an H&P? I may be a med student, but I'm not a damn child, and really, by the time I had done two H&Ps, the novelty wore off and all subsequent ones are just work. Idiot. I wish I could come to your hospital and punch your resident in the head.

Also, medicine H&Ps are f*cking stupid. I don't care if the patient has a cat or used to work in a saw mill 15 years ago.

 

[Mayhem]

Also, medicine H&Ps are f*cking stupid. I don't care if the patient has a cat or used to work in a saw mill 15 years ago.

Blasphemy! That's very important information. I bet you don't even ask if that cat's maternal grandmother was ever diagnosed with toxoplasmosis.

 

[Tired]

Blasphemy! That's very important information. I bet you don't even ask if that cat's maternal grandmother was ever diagnosed with toxoplasmosis.

On Ob, I always wanted to ask the prenatal patients at their clinic visits, "Do you now, or have you ever, ingested cat feces?"