So this weekend I finished (finally) my Internal Medicine rotation. It's the longest of the rotations this year, 3 months! I spent one month at St. John's doing outpatient clinics, one month at the VA, and this last month at
SLU on one of the geriatrics teams (sorry Mom and Dad, Scott and Colleen, but it didn't quite entice me to go into geriatrics). I think it was a great way to start out the year, and hope that it was a good foundation for everything else this year. I took my Shelf exam on Friday and it was a
doozy...I
definitely could have used another hour to get through it. But as long as I did better than the 5
th percentile I'll be just fine. Tomorrow I start my 6 week rotation in Family Medicine...I imagine that it will be pretty similar to outpatient internal medicine.
Anyhoo, I should have shared more funny stories from the past three months as they happened, but never really did. Something funny did happen the other week. I saw one of my patients (who had broken her femur and was extremely hard of hearing) in the morning before rounds with the attending physician. I went to the area where our team was going to meet and started to write my note on my patient. After a few minutes I noticed there was a high-pitched buzzing sound, kind of like some feedback coming over a sound system. It was extremely annoying, but I tried to forget about it and keep writing. Another student was sitting with me and asked me if I could hear the annoying sound. I said yes and we both expressed how annoying it was and that we hoped it would stop quickly.
As we went on rounds, the buzzing was still with us...it was in the hallway, in each of the patients rooms, it was especially loud in one of the doorways of one of rooms we went into. Weird. I thought it might just be a problem on the 9th floor, but it was just as loud an annoying on the 8th and even the 7th floor. I was very annoyed and was planning how I was going to figure out the cause of the sound after we finished rounding. I wanted to find out who was responsible for this and let them know that it needed to stop.
Then we started talking about one of our last patients. He was another elderly gentleman that was hard of hearing. My attending said that we might want to use the "Pocket Talker" with this patient as well. When she said this, I immediately felt like an incredibly huge idiot. Why you ask? Well, first of all, a "Pocket Talker" is a little amplifying device...it's basically a microphone hooked up to some earphones. My attending had lent me one for the last week to help me to talk with my patient. It's a great little device and had really helped with my patient, but as with any other technology or electronic equipment it's only as useful and helpful as the person who's using it. I reached into my pocket frantically and switched the On/Off switch and IMMEDIATELY the sound vanished. Just think, in a little under two years this Einstein is going to have an M.D. behind his name and might have a little more responsibility than just a little Pocket Talker. I'm just saying you've been warned. Needless to say I felt incredibly foolish and apologized profusely to my team for driving them nuts for the last 40 minutes.
It's tougher than it looks for some of us :)
