Two Weeks

It's amazing what a difference just two short weeks can make. For the past two weeks, I have been working on the labor and delivery service, first on day shift, then on night shift. It's hard to believe it's only been that long, because I feel like I've learned so much that I've been doing this forever. I wish I could have updated more with some of the funnier and/or crazier stories, but when you work a 14-15 hour night, pretty much all that's left is to come home, sleep as long as you can, and head straight back. Luckily, I am off all weekend (!!) before starting on the Gyn/Onc (pelvic cancers) service on Monday. In lieu of an entire post of insane stories, here is a list of some of the lessons we learned as we began our first year of clinical education.

1. There is safety in numbers. It must be a relatively entertaining sight to be an upper level resident or attending wandering through a hospital in early July, watching the looks on the faces of the brand-new third years. I mean, this week we were given a ten minute "tour" of our university's hospital, and then on day 1 were basically dropped off at our location du jour and told to get things going. Lost doesn't even begin to describe. To cope, we tended to travel almost everywhere we went in a pack.

2. It is startling how fast you can adjust to getting up at 4am. I thought it would take years, but that first week I actually wasn't all that tired--I just went to bed at 9 every day. Of course, along with that comes the fact that when you get off work at 5 and go to bed at 9, there's not much time to do anything, but oh well.

3. Medicine is not for the weak-of-heart. On my very first day on the labor floor, I got to deliver a placenta, which is possibly one of the bloodiest and most disgusting things in all of medicine. Some of the surgeries I saw were less gross. But when you're in there, it's kind of just surreal because you don't think about the gross, just about trying to do the right thing at the right time and not piss off the resident. Oh, and not kill the patient. Of course.

4. The emotions can get you. On my last night on night shift on labor and delivery, the juxtaposition between the two main patients who arrived that night was so great that I almost couldn't wrap my head around. On the one hand, we got to share in the incredible joy of a new mom giving birth with her entire family present, screaming and jumping and applauding the arrival of a new life into the world. On the other, we stood by helplessly as the doctors informed another couple that their just-shy-of-viable fetus was probably not going to live, and their devastation was palpable. It was a strange gamut of emotion that rather eloquently wrapped up the experiences on the floor.

5. You learn SO much more doing things in real life. Two years of medical education behind me, and I'm pretty sure I've retained more information in the past two weeks. While I don't know that I'm necessarily interested in OB as a specialty, it is certainly way more entertaining and satisfying to work and learn in the hospital, where information has meaning because there's someone down the hall with the problem you just talked about. Honestly, I thought I would die working 12-15 hour shifts, but they go by fast when you're busy and you get to see a lot and learn a lot. In fact, just this week I saw: at least 4-5 deliveries, 3-4 C-sections, an open surgery to evacuate a blood clot in someone's abdomen, a laparoscopic surgery to diagnose abdominal pain, and countless patients coming in and out of our triage area with complaints ranging from labor to back pain to swollen feet to urinary tract infections. And from all of them, amazingly, I learned something. Who knew?