Wards

Dear UC Wards:

Could I please have the last 4 weeks of my life back? No? OKAY GREAT. My experience on any given service is almost entirely determined by how I feel about my coworkers. I loved the attending and the resident we had for the first week. The med students did their work and best of all, did their own thing, and I rarely saw them. The last few weeks, our resident has been an interesting mix of micro-managing and work-averse, our attending has been very nice but also somewhat intimidating and a bit of a fan of the traumatic Socratic teaching method (ie, pimps me with questions during walk-rounds while I'm day-dreaming and not even realizing that the attending was talking to me, so I look like a big time ra-tard). Although I will admit the teaching was good. The other intern was solid and took care of his work.

The fourth year student, doing his "acting internship", was brilliant. The problem is, he is remarkably arrogant and pompous for one so young and unaccomplished and constantly infuriated me by making remarks such as a certain patient I took on call would be good for me to "practice what you learned during rounds" (after the pharmacy resident prepared a very nice presentation for us on opioid equivalents and conversions that day), or not to worry that "not much is expected of you at your level of training" in terms of teaching the med students. Or how about the time he tried to sign out to me getting outside hospital medical records for the patient he'd had for the past 5 days on his day off when I was cross-covering his patients? JACKASS.

The third year student was another little slice of heaven. No sense of personal space (we had to have a talk about what "personal space" means), wouldn't cover his mouth when he COUGHED until I asked him to repeatedly, and subsequently shared his cold with me, and I was sick for 3 WEEKS. Apparently taking overnight call isn't the best way to get over a cold. Anyway, he also decided not to listen to any of my suggestions for his notes or presentations... but he WOULD completely copy and paste my progress notes (when I confronted him about this he flatly denied... come on, he even copied my physical exam!). The BEST incidence was on our last post-call day; I offered to meet with him before rounds to go over his presentation. We sit down, his plan sounds good, but so familiar... until I look down and realized he is READING MY OWN H&P TO ME, WORD FOR WORD, and passing it off as his own!!! I interrupted him and said, "I feel like you're reading my own H&P to me." He again, FLATLY DENIED and said, "Oh no, this is MY H&P." "Okay, but the wording is exactly the same as my H&P-" "That's because we talked about the plan last night." "Right, but I wouldn't expect the wording to be exactly the same, the sentence structure, organization..." at this point he paused, then continued to read MY OWN assessment and plan to me. After listening to him read a few more sentences verbatim from my H&P, I interrupted him and said, "Ok, well you know that I'm going to agree with the rest of your plan since I wrote it, so I think we're done here." I felt kind of bad, but I was also kind of outraged that he was plagiarizing my work and then insulted me by lying about it to my face! Plagiarism is something students can fail rotations for! And it was the third time I had confronted him about it! WTF man!

But what about the patient care? ...what about it? It happened. There is so much going on with juggling your patients on most days it's like... imagine running down the length of a soccer field and there are dodgeballs coming at you from both directions. You have 3 minutes to reach the other end of the field, avoiding being hit by any of the balls. Oh, side note, the air is full of butterflies and you have to catch 20 of them on your way. With your bare hands. And protect them on your way to the other end of the field. And occasionally a great big wolly mammoth comes and just stands in your way, and asks you why we run across fields, what the butterflies are, and why you're in such a hurry. This is a wolly med student. So if every day was like this for 4 weeks... you can imagine that most days wouldn't be too memorable unless something especially good or especially bad happened. The only patients that really stick out are the young alcoholic who died from liver failure, and the diabetic man who forgot my name but asked my attending to thank me for all my hard work and care the day he was discharged (I was off that day).

Moving on.

Starting the heme-onc service Monday. For a month. The silver lining around the oncology cloud is that the other interns I'm going to be working with are EXCELLENT. I'm looking forward to commiserating with my comrades to power through the next 4 weeks. I'm also looking forward to theme days. Like Fergie Tuesdays. Whatever Fergie means to you, that is what your day should be about. Fancy Friday? Mustache Monday? I'll work on it.

The only other thing I'm looking forward to, in life, is HALLOWEEN. ONLY 6 WEEKS LEFT TO GET YOUR DECORATIONS UP!!!