Ramblings

So a little update on the baby from the previous blog. She is doing well, but as it turns out I wasn't completely paranoid. She did develop some respiratory problems over the weekend and into today, however, that's not to say I was right about the treatment, I guess I knew enough to see something going wrong possibly, but not enough to know how to treat it (my attending today recommended a diuretic to get the fluid off the baby's lungs and she is doing better).

Today I put in umbilical artery and vein lines. It's amazing how much faster you learn as an intern compared to being a student. When you are a student, everything is hands off. When you are a resident, you would actually have to say "I can't do this." in order to get out of doing it. In the week or so I've been doing this I've already learned so much, I can see how intense this is going to be and how well it will prepare me for when I hop off the branch and fly on my own.

Overall today was pretty low key, I'm finally getting the hang of alot of what the NICU is. My patients didn't have any big interesting issues today, some I'm preparing to discharge (the parents are so happy when we tell them - some have been their for several months. Can you imagine?)

A little on my current schedule. - might be boring so skip it you want.

So right now I'm working on the NICU which is from 6am till I get my work done (max of 5pm). I have call every 4 days which is from 6am until 12am the next day, during that day I have to go to deliveries and receive any high risk babies that come my way (no matter the hour). The days off I get are variable, depending on where my call day falls, basically if I'm not on call on the weekends then I get those days off (ie thursday-call days I get both saturday and sunday off; saturday-call days I get half a day off...in two weeks...ouch, which I will probably use to sleep).

It's actually not so bad, however I'm just starting it so maybe I should say that at the end of the rotation - I think hay harvest on the farm sucks worse - these city kids got it easy ;P. Tomorrow I'm on call and I feel like I just got done with my last one. Also one day out of the week I go to my clinic in the afternoon to see my patients, so tomorrow will be the first day I grace outpatient pediatrics as a doctor (sounds fun, we'll see). I also got some handy-dandy business cards from the school that I hand out to new patients, which is cool...I can't believe after 12 years high school, 4 years pre-med, and 4 years medical school I finally have a job (that I get paid minimum wage for - but at least I'm getting paid) I just calculated it out, I get paid 11.78$ an hour, however, I have to pay ~2000$, a month in medical school loan bills - thank you health care reform! (you used to be able to defer them until you started getting paid well)

I know I should pay more attention to reform, but my stance (right now) is that I'm busy and health care is going to do it's thing regardless of what some peon resident does or doesn't do. I wish I had something more interesting to blog, but I can't think, I'm so groggy right now, so until then.

Newbie-Doc