Adventures in Medical School

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Just like Grey's Anatomy
by fiona

I have the day off! I have the day off!

After a particularly brutal string of 12 hour shifts, I have not only 1 day off, but the entire weekend. And I got to sleep in and it is a beautiful day and I got to play guitar hero for the first time last night. Turns out, guitar hero is very very fun.

My first 2 weeks of internship have already come and gone, a fact which is utterly incomprehensible to me. This fast-forward time vortex that I seem to have stepped into - triggered I think by merely setting foot in the emergency department - is fueled by a combination of long hours and constant activity and a near total lack of free time. This is an exageration, but for the first week I did work noon to midnight every day except thursday, my day off, when I had to be there from 6:30 am til noon for conference. I felt like I when I wasn't literally in the hospital I was either sleeping, studying, or getting ready to go back to the hospital.

But once I am there, it is totally fun. And stressful, and weird, and hard to keep everything together. Because now that I am the "primary medical provider" for all of my patients, I am responsible for writing all the orders and all the prescriptions and fully documenting everything and admiting patients and calling for consults... etc. And when you combine this with my inherent slowness and newbie inefficiency, things take a while.

But, boy do I have some stories. For example...

Two words sum up my first shift as an intern: penile laceration. Welcome to your new life as a doctor, now stitch up that man's penis.

And then on my second shift (or maybe my third - who can keep track): there was the very pleasant gentleman who was spewing blood from his tracheostomy site - the hole in the neck that people who have had their larynxes removed breathe through. Everytime he coughed blood would spurt out of his neck and land on the underside of his chin, and then drip down onto his shirt. At one point he got lost on the way back from the bathroom and was wandering around the department with blood coming out of the gaping hole in his neck, using his robotic voice-amplifier device to ask people if they could help him. Just the nicest man.

And then I was working on the night of July 4th from 6 until 2am. There was a noticeable lull, a palpable calm before the storm, followed by an influx of drunk people who had injured themselves in a variety of very un-humerous ways. I got to reduce a guy's dislocated ankle, put a bunch of plaster splints on, and try to track down the man with the bloody face who had removed his c-collar and left the department, presumably to attempt his own brand of vigilante justice.

Then, at 3:30 in the morning, I got a security escort to the resident library, where I took advantage of the new plush leather sofa. I slept for a couple hours, and then made my way to the conference room where I was scheduled to lead the intern reading group in a discussion of lacerations to the scalp, face, lip, nose, hands, and feet.

As you can see, my life is exactly like Grey's Anatomy! I have already slept with 3 of my attendings and have been yelled at repeatedly by the stern and sassy senior resident, who, beneath it all, really has my best interest at heart. Also I am living in a house with all of the other interns and we accidentally see eachother naked all of the time and then learn valuable life lessons while competing with eachother for who can deliver the conjoined twins from the 14 year old amish transexual with three uteruses and a fatal brain tumor who just got impaled by a streetlight. Also, everyone is in love with me. Being a doctor is awesome!

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