Another week bites the dust, from the desk of kyle
Friday, March 27, 2009
Once again Saturday afternoon has ticked around.
After 3 more days in community mental health I feel like I’ve made some more progress forward, for the first week I felt like I was becoming more safe in talking to the clients, for the second week like I was becoming more comfortable and for the third week I felt like I was becoming more effective, I wonder what I’ll feel like after next week.
The GP as per usual was busy in the extreme, there was a point where I had to hold my tongue when I wanted to metaphorically rip the karvezide rep a new one (for those of you that haven’t read Littlejohn et.al., the karvezide reps are spruiking a study that had 87% loss to follow up or exclusion, so that by the end of the 2 year study only 130 out of the over 1000 original participants were still involved). But despite this I had an overall good day.
Seminar day was more or less the usual, talking about what we learned during the week, which I must admit I never really found that helpful.
But the absolute standout, as always, was overnight shift in the ED on Thursday night. As tiring as it is to go Thursday day -> Thursday night -> Friday day without sleeping it’s indescribably worth it. Some of the highlights this week include
- Stapling a patients head wound closed (5cm gash from an assault with a weapon)
- The surgical reg spending a good portion of his night going through every slice of every CT done in the hospital that day with us
- Not looking like an idiot why being asked to explain why a #nof x-ray was so bad (it was sub-capital)
- Free, tasty muffins
- Troponins, cannulas, blood gasses and various other scut work which is still kind of fun when you don’t get it anywhere else.
- Seeing just what morphine can do in about 60 seconds.
- Jeeda (one of the other 2 med students) finding the strongest instant coffee sticks ever (we probably should have only used one per cup though)
- I heard carotid bruits for the first time
- Lots of interesting patients that I can’t talk about with being a bit too identifying
I think ED nightshift is going to be a weekly thing for the three of us from now on.