the underwear drawer. every day of the week. |
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Sunday . July 06 . 2003 . 10:36am the first week I finished my first week as an intern on another rousing call night, and now have the rest of the weekend off. Thank god. I need the break. I still don't know what I'm doing, still don't know squat about Pediatric medicine, and can barely remember my patients' names half the time, but I think that this job is getting a little bit easier now that the initial swirl of disorientation has worn off. I'm even starting to enjoy some aspects of it, though most of these things are procedural, like stamping my own patient's prescriptions (I love the stamper) and actually conversing with the consult fellows on a somewhat meaningful level. What I do find somewhat laughable, however, is the idea that I've been assigned medical students to teach. Because, in all honesty, freshly minted third year med students who have just finished taking Step I of the Boards will know a hell of a lot more about the metabolic underpinnings of galactosemia than I could hope to remember. I have a lot of stuff that I can teach about the logistics of being a good medical student, patient management, organization, and how to structure the day, but when it comes to the academics, I really have to get back up to speed myself. Already I have a pile of articles to review and topics to look up that I'm behind on, so any teaching about those things will have to wait. * * * There's a patient in the hospital that I've been preoccupied with the past few days. He's just an infant, has been bounced around from hospital to hospital now for most of his life, and we have no idea what's wrong with him. No matter what we do, he keeps getting worse. We're doing test after test, phlebotomizing him down to nothing, suggesting more and more invasive diagnostics, and all we're doing is making it worse. We have no diagnosis. The mother, who doesn't speak English, is beside herself with worry and confusion. I have this nervous feeling that I'm going to return from work after this weekend and the kid is going to be dead. This may be unnecessarily fatalistic, but that just how I feel. I know that if he weren't in the hospital, he might die anyway, but I get the uncomfortable feeling that all we're doing is killing him faster. We'll see how he's doing tomorrow. * * * I think that Joe and I are coping with our opposing schedules as well as can be expected. Since our hours are almost exactly opposite, we went from Tuesday to Friday morning without seeing each other, with the exception of a two minute interlude outside the subway station as I was returning home from work and he was leaving for it. Good times outside the 6 train. Luckily, I have the weekend off, and he had all of Saturday off and no work Sunday (today) until 7pm, so we can spend some time together. And, to be honest, it isn't all that terrible. Sure, it sucks to come home to an empty house, and to live in the same house but never see each other, but we both have so many things to do when I get home and so little energy to devote to any of them that it's not like our evening time would be so high-quality anyway. I'm going to bed before 10:00 every night, for chrissake. The way it is now, our time together is a little more of a commodity, and we make more of an effort to go out and do something special rather than hang around the house. And we have tons of stuff to talk about, since we haven't had a chance to hash out the minutiae of the days past. And finally, it's really only two weeks that he's on nightfloat, only a week to go, so it's not like it's going to be like this for the rest of our lives or anything. Ladies, don't marry a night watchman. (But no offense to those of you who already have.) * * * So yesterday, we watched "Charlie's Angels 2", because we didn't have enough brain power to devote to either "28 Days" or "Capturing the Friendmans." The movie didn't have so much of a plot as just an excuse to string together a series of scenarios for the three ladies to wear different outfits and kick ass in highly improbable ways, but it was fun. I guess they couldn't figure out a way to work the carwash scenario into the "story", so they just tacked it onto the end, over the credits. Also, I am curiously fascinated with Crispin Glover. Anyone that eccentric must at least be pretty interesting to talk to. We came home from dinner and the movie to find that Cooper had completely destroyed her water bowl, spilling water everywhere, and gnawed off the edges of our coffee-cum-TV table. This must be the secondary destruction phase that we've heard so much about. And she's developmentally right on time, at ten months. Hooray, our dog is not developmentally delayed! It's not the worst thing, the table is crappy IKEA pine, probably to be chucked the next time we move anyway, and the water bowl was getting too small for her and needed to be replaced. At least she hasn't gotten it into her head to start tearing up something actually expensive, like the couch. Of course, now that I've said that, tomorrow I'm going to come home to a tattered pile of upholstery and stuffing. xo Michelle |
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