A Random Header Image
25th March 2008

my day

posted in Uncategorized |

Oh how I love thee, Tuesday morning clinics.

I had five patients on my schedule this morning. My first patient was one who I haven’t seen in over a year and a half, but patient had been calling my nurse on a daily basis for the past 3 months, so I was very aware how needy this particular patient is. I prevailed and managed to get through most of the list of complaints and exam in 25 minutes. I stepped outside to staff him with my program director, who after hearing patient’s name, told me to find someone else to staff, because patient was complicated and needy. Fine. Waited 15 minutes for another doctor, finally staffed and we went back into patient’s room again, where he briefly examined the patient and I wote out new prescriptions and instructions on how to take the medication so patient won’t come in again saying “I thought I was supposed to take it this way” (at least 10 minutes of the discussion had been focused on that).

Visit started: 8:40 (medical assistant took ten minutes to get meds into computer, which were still wrong).
Visit ended: 9:55
Visit scheduled to end: 9:00

Second patient (scheduled for 9:00) was placed in room, a new patient to the clinic. Patient spoke thickly accented English and I have to ask questions several times to get answers to what I asked. At 10:30, I noticed that my 10:00 patient had arrived and at 10:32, my 11:00 was there as well. (My 10:30 patient, thankfully, never showed up as I have no idea why I’m seeing this patient in the first place). Patient moved very slowly and most movements were limited by pain, so examining him took a long time as well. Because I hate feeling like I’m just the scribe for the attending, I took a few minutes to counsel patient on what I thought was going on and the lifestyle modifications that were necessary to prevent further problems, before heading out to find the attending. I briefly outlined the case in 5 minutes, we discussed other treatment options, and went back into the room where my attending confirmed the complaints and the physical exam and once again, counseled patient on lifestyle modifications and what was the cause for symptoms. We decided to make some changes to patient’s medications and I’m left to do the counseling, the instructing, the reinstructing, the refocusing away from the litany of other concerns that have now cropped up.

Visit started 10:00
Visit ended 11:35

In the meantime, my 10:00 patient (who arrived late) was seen by another resident, so I was only a half hour late. I walked out of the room to find my 11:00 patient AWOL and my program director telling me that he’ll be sitting in “like a bump on a log” for my next clinic day, so he can figure out why I’m so slow.

That’s right boys and girls, I’m now in remedial clinic and being observed like a fourth year medical student.

I’ve got only 8 more months of this. Eight more and then I’ll be off to medicine clinic where it’s even more patients in a shorter amount of time (but only 1 attending to deal with and I think it’ll make a big difference).

To top it off, I just read this story and now I’m so disturbed and squicked out that, ugh, I’m having bad nightmares tonight.

Argh. I’ve got a presentation that I’m supposed to give on Thursday, which I haven’t done much more work on than just opening up PowerPoint and picking the background (blue, always blue with white letters. Easiest to read). So I should be doing that.

There are other things that potentially could be brewing that are freaking me out and I know that, as usual, I’m overreacting, so we’re going to hold on discussing them until things settle one way or another.

We’re supposed to get more snow on Thursday. They say that we’re about 12 inches from the record set something in the 1800s, so I’m all go for it. It might as well be for some good.

And this ends the random news for the day.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 11:00 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Comments

Leave a Reply

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

  • Julia’s Journal

  • Just an ordinary girl.
  • Archives

  • RSS Red Head Snippet

    • Books read October-December 01/01/2024
      My goal was to read 120 books this year. I just finished number 129. (Some of these I reviewed as part of my WWW posts). October: Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt. I had high expectations for this book, as it had been so praised, and I felt let down by it. Still enjoyable, […]