newbies
Hello, so I seem to have survived my first few weeks of working life, more or less. Now I find myself on a week of my annual leave, which I would rather have taken later on in the year, but which the powers that be who make my rota decided I really ought to take now instead. Ah well. I've not been paid yet and I haven't got any cash for going away with, so I'm spending my holiday here in Edinburgh, which is fine, because there's still lots to sort out with the new flat and lots of people I haven't seen in a while whom it'll be nice to catch up with.
The job was pretty scary for the first few days. On arrival on the ward on the first morning, I had barely taken off my coat before I was asked to prescribe the pre-breakfast insulin for a patient whom I'd never met. I felt like the nurse should really check with a more senior doctor before letting me sign the prescription and even though it was just a routine medication, I had never been more terrified signing my name to something than to that first prescription. These things get less scary with repetition though, thankfully, and I've got used to writing up morphine for people like it was sweeties already.
The job is actually really quite manageable most days now that I know a bit more what I'm doing but the first few days were really overwhelming. I was wondering why I'd ever wanted to be a doctor when I clearly sucked so badly at it and I actually caught myself thinking in one really horrifically boring surgical meeting, "Don't worry, Amy. You can just use this all as material for your novel when you give up medicine to pursue a career as a writer of fiction." Hmm.
Weekdays are generally ok because there are lots of other doctors on the wards with me. My first Saturday was my fourth day at work though and that was absolutely horrendous because for most of the day I was the only doctor on the ward and nurses kept coming to me saying things like, "This patient is bleeding out of her radial artery. What should we do?" or "This patient has just dropped his blood pressure into his boots and his heart is going at about a fifth of the rate it ought to be. Do you want to change his medications?" or "This man's leg is falling off. What are you going to do?" (paraphrasing, paraphrasing). At the end of the day there were still three new admissions to the ward whom I had yet to even clap eyes upon, let alone clerk in and at 10:45 at night, 90 minutes after I was supposed to go home, I ended up handing them over to the Hospital at Night (HaN) doctors, feeling immensely useless and guilty about it all.
That was a bad day though, and generally I feel more on top of my jobs now. I have yet to get a crash call when I've been carrying the cardiac arrest bleep though and I still feel really twitchy on days when I have to carry that bleep, in case it goes off and I have to go sprinting off to some remote part of the hospital to go and jump on someone's chest. Eep.
It really helps that I've started in a department where the nurses and senior doctors are all so kind and friendly and supportive thoguh. The consultants are truly some of the nicest I've ever met and they never mind me asking them all sorts of stupid questions. I actually met one of them for the first time whilst wandering, hopelessly lost, through the cath labs, looking for someone to talk to about a Hickman line insertion and when he realised I was one of his trainees he personally went and found me the relevant nurse coordinator to sort it out for me, which was really kind of him. Another consultant, whom I shall refer to as Dr. F just in case he ever googles himself, is a little bit mental and walks around the wards singing his own little made up wordless tunes to himself along the lines of "dooby de doo doo, yeah yeah yeah, woo woo, dooby de dooby de doo" etc etc. He also has a habit of prank calling the junior doctors in our office, putting on a variety of ridiculous foreign accents and posing as fictitious patients or relatives of patients. I answered the phone to a Polish gentleman who was insisting that his wife had had a heart attack and was being treated on our ward. When I told him that there was nobody of that name on the ward, he became increasingly distressed and started asking me what we had done with his wife and where we had taken her and so on and so forth. Fortunately I had been forewarned about Dr. F and his hilarious antics, so I didn't have to make a total fool of myself, but some of the other guys have been caught out. They have so far had a Russian man whose coronary artery stent had supposedly burst out through a wound in his chest and an Irish man who wanted a pacemaker putting in electively as a birthday present for his wife. What is really funny is that it turns out that Dr. F is my personal educational supervisor, so I'm going to have to deal with him a whole lot more over the coming months. Joy.
Apart from work stuff, I have so far had the easy end of the rota and so have had lots of time for fun stuff too. My mum came to stay for a week and she took me out to loads of things in the fringe. The best things I saw were Daniel Kitson's new play, Josie Long, The Penny Dreadfuls and Terry Saunders. Darren Hanlon came to stay at the flat for a bit too and we went to see him play down in Leith with My Tiny Robots and the Wave Pictures. I had to leave before the end to go to a work night out though, but Darren's set was really good. We also went to see some of Emily's Retreat gigs and I really enjoyed Withered Hand, 'Allo Darlin' and Eagleowl and My Kappa Roots. The Eagleowl EP is truly lovely, btw, and everyone should go out and buy a copy. I've also been to see WALL-E at the cinema and that is yet another wonderful Pixar film. I went to see Noah and the Whale the other week as well and they were brilliant but there were some really obnoxious tall girls stood right in front of me who positively reeked of rum and they wouldn't stop talking through almost the whole gig, despite lots of people asking them to be quiet. Hmph. People who do things like that should actually be shot.
The new flat has been getting sorted out a bit more too and we have had lots of people round for dinner already. Caroline was up visiting with her boyfriend Paul and they came round on Tuesday and we stayed up very late playing scrabble and drinking wine whilst Paul played the piano for us, which was excellent. Then Soph and James and Keri's old flatmates came round, then Gen and Lynne and basically the flat has felt full of people the whole time and it's been really lovely. This weekend it was the indiesoc flat's flatleaving party whish was ace but at the same time rather sad, since it is the end of four years of ace parties at that flat. I shall miss it, depsite all the rat-eaten furniture and everything. Keri made an amazing silver cake in the shape of a Tennents can as a very fitting homage to the flat and decorated it with chocolate rats and it was basically a work of genius.
Yesterday I got up late, cooked us a Sunday roast and then went to the evening service at church, which was meeting for the last time before we move back to our proper building on York Place. It's been two and a half years since we moved out for the building work and it is very exciting to think about moving back next week, especially since it will mean I only have to walk up the road to go to church instead of having to schlepp all the way across town to get there. Yay! It was a really good sermon last night actually and I feel a lot more positive about my church than I have done in quite a while.
Anyway. I'd better head home and get some dinner now. We don't have the internet set up in the new flat yet and I've had to spend all day today in a computer lab to do my online training for my job, which was yawnsome in the extreme, but I bumped into a bucnh of people from my old Bible study group in here, which was a nice diversion.
Gosh, I really have written an awful lot of waffle this time, haven't I? Apologies; I really ought to edit myself more harshly, but I guess I can't be bothered.