18 Weeks

Man, is New York *great*!

OK, the rotation has turned out a bit disappointing, more on that later. But all the bargains you can find – and people literally chasing you down the street to give you a better deal! Just the other day I saw some great designer bags for something like 90% off the store price – and the guy said he could afford to sell it so cheaply because he didn’t have any expenses. I mean, how expensive could the trashbag he was carrying stuff around in cost? I even managed to get a great deal on a watch; I had to really negotiate with the guy. I was cautious at first, until he reassured me it was genuine and that Rolex is really spelled ‘Ro!ex’ like the ones he had. He seemed nice, and he was selling it out of a classy leather briefcase on a corner in Times Square. But can anyone tell me:

Is my wrist supposed to be turning green?

Anyway, things have picked up a little on the patient front. I have had a range of patients in the ICU over the past month; most have made it, some haven’t. Many of the stories from the patients about why they came into hospital started out with ‘Well, I had been drinking with my friends for a few days…’ (Ya know, now that I think about it, I have a bunch of stories from my second year at Ohio State that start the same way. But I digress.): a couple of guys who were guests of the State of New York and were handcuffed to the hospital bed; a guy who came into the emergency room with a complaint of ‘it hurts’ – and could give us no other information; a guy who fell off a ladder and fractured his leg trying to break into *his* house; a guy who was playing ‘young boy games’ and jumped out of a second-story window on a dare (he broke *both* legs), and a guy who was sitting out front of his apartment building when - and I am not making this up – an air conditioner fell on his head.

I just realized that all the patients in this ward with dumb injuries were guys…

But my time here in Harlem is up (a couple of pix are up of me in Harlem Hospital at the blog: www.dowunderdoc.blogspot.com ) and while the folks I work with are great and I have managed to learn a few things, I am glad to be done. Next up, I head to Ohio on Sunday for 4 weeks of emergency medicine followed by 4 weeks of orthopedic surgery, both at the Cleveland Clinic. After that, it’s 6 weeks of radiology in Richmond, VA; I finish that November 4, and if all goes well, that’s the end of my clinical rotations with 4 weeks of vacation from November 4 until December 4. For those playing along with the home version, I am *18* weeks from being a doctor.

Hey! I saw that cold chill run up your spine!

And with that, it’s the weekend. Time to finish packing and get on a plane outta here. I’ll spend the weekend in DC packing for Cleveland and getting ready to deal with emergency medicine and my family (no, the two are not related). Not to mention showing off my new ‘Guccy’ bag…

As always, Love to All and keep working on your 101 List!
Bryan

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Trust Me: I'm a Medical Student

Harlem Hospital Center

At the Met

Harlem

Harlem

Boy, was I excited.

I had managed to not only get a rotation at Columbia University for July (they only accept the top 10 Flinders students who apply), but I also was going to get to do Trauma Surgery! In Harlem, no less! What more could a medical student wish for?

Well, as Mom is always happy to remind: Careful what you wish for – you just might get it.

Oh, don’t get me wrong – things started out well. I was walking to the hospital on my first day, all decked out in a set of scrubs with my snazzy little med student lab coat (With lots of pockets. Which is a bit of a hazard. In a very short time I have managed to accumulate about 20 pounds of stuff in those pockets; enough so that I now walk with a hunch. Stethoscope, reference books, needles, syringes, snacks, water bottle, band-aids, blood tubes and – this being New York City and all – Jimmy Hoffa was hidden in the inside left pocket for a few days. But I digress). It felt good to be finally getting back to ‘work’, closer to being done and to be honest, it was neat to be a medical student in the US.

That feeling, however, didn’t last long.

Where do I begin? The 6:30am starts; the on-call every third day (which means 24+ hours in the hospital with very little opportunity for sleep); the senior doctor who likes to grill the residents and students and hear himself talk, leading to looooong ward rounds; getting most questions wrong due to differences between here and Oz; no one really telling me what I was to be doing or what was expected of me; the surly-and-not-too-cute nursing staff; or the fact that, after two weeks of trauma surgery, I have seen one trauma and no surgeries.

Not that I am *wishing* for either more trauma or surgery – Mom, I think I have learned my lesson…

When I am not actively doing a trauma – which is most of the time – I help take care of patients in the Surgical ICU. These are patients who are either very sick and going to surgery, or very sick after being in surgery. You get to see all kinds of things and it really tests you; you need to know a lot about a lot of things, and you really have to keep close tabs on the patients – they can go south very quickly. Which means regular checks, lots of monitoring and drawing blood at least twice a day to see how the patients are doing. And some things are still the same here as back in Oz: All three times I have been on-call, we have had a patient ‘code’, and two of them didn’t make it. And before you ask, yes:

I drew blood from all three of them.

And with that, it’s the weekend. Being NYC and all, there is always something to do and see. I’m going to go exploring and tr a few pizza places that have been suggested to me, plus getting ready for yet another week of fun-and-games. Not to mention finding someplace new for Jimmy…

As always, Love to All and keep working on your 101 List!
Bryan

Vodka

Again, I couldn’t sleep.

Not that anyone in steerage class ever sleeps on those long international flights. (Not well, anyway – I mean, how can you sleep when you’re herded into seats barely wide enough to fit your rump, along with the rest of humanity, and the guy in front of you decides he wants to recline his seat into your lap, all the while –just on the other side of that fabled curtain – you can see the folks in Business Class, whose seats transform into huge beds with 600-count Egyptian cotton sheets and feather-down comforters and fluffy pillows, lounging around in their jammies. Makes you wonder what happens up in the First Class area. Maybe some kinda deal where the cute stewardesses give massages or something. But I digress.) So I shifted and paced and ate and drank and watched a movie and listened to music and stared at the ceiling. I finally decided I had enough and I took a sleeping pill.

An hour later, I was still awake.

Wide awake. With bad movies on, no one to talk to, and hours until the next meal. Now, I’d like to point out here that one of the weak areas of the education at Flinders is Pharmacology. That said, I still should know better than to do what I did next. And it wasn’t just that I took a second sleeping pill.

It’s that I washed it down with one of those little airline bottles of vodka.

The rest of the trip is a bit of a blur; I *think* I changed planes in San Francisco; coulda been Tierra del Fuego for all I knew. Somehow, I made it home to Washington, DC, where I got to enjoy our nations’ capital for about 20 hours before I boarded a train to Philadelphia to take another one of those joyous USMLE tests, this one a practical exam. At least I think I took a practical exam.

Either that or 12 innocent people had some rather invasive exams they didn’t expect…

On Monday, I head off to New York City to start my first US rotation; Trauma Surgery at Harlem Hospital. I found housing via the internet; thanks to everyone who made suggestions and phone calls to help me out. And following years of Mom complaining about me being so far away, and wishing I could be closer to the ol’ homestead, after New York I head to Cleveland for 8 weeks – 4 in emergency medicine and 4 in orthopedic surgery.

As you always taught us, Mom: Careful what you wish for; you just might get it!

And with that, it’s the weekend. I need to head off to West Virginia for a wedding - I figure since Dad is from West Virginia and so is the bride, that I am related to her somehow. I’ll also be packing for a month in New York – not to mention trying to get the cap off this little bottle of vodka…

As always, Love to All and keep working on your 101 List!
Bryan