a little caught up on sleep
In all fairness, that was a bad time for me to come back to my blog after a few months of silence. I was just like, "hmm...it's the middle of the night and there is no one awake to listen to me complain, so I'll just do it online. Then I can delude myself into believing that EVERYONE is sympathetically listening to me complain. Great success!" But that night actually wasn't quite as bad as I made it out to be. I drew blood successfully for the first time (took long enough, I know) on a patient earlier in the evening. And that case did end up going. Instead of a whitebread appendectomy, it turned out to be a right hemicolectomy, and despite the ungodly hour that we started, it was a good case. The attending was a talkative, good-natured older man who made a point to show me all the notable structures in the abdomen. He traced the small intestine down to the appendix, let me palpate the liver, and indicated the peristalsing ureters as they coursed down to the hidden bladder. It turned out that the right-sided abdominal pain the patient had been feeling wasn't appendicitis at all; it was colon cancer. So as much as losing a night's sleep feels like shit, it feels good to be helping on a case where they're all but curing a guy of insidious cancer.
This surgery rotation has been an interesting experience, albeit an exhausting one. It was easier the first six weeks when I was on subspecialty rotations. Ortho I loved and want to pursue, anesthesia I found numbingly boring, and urology was filled with dirty penis jokes cracked by the oldest grandpas of surgery. Creepiness central! Now I'm on general surgery and work twelve hour days, except every fourth day when I'm on 24 hour call. That usually turns into 28 hours though, since I can't leave the next morning until rounds are done and the chief resident lets me leave. So at the moment, I get around five hours of sleep a night and I'm usually a car wreck by Wednesday morning. Sleep deprivation has left me clumsy, inarticulate, and guilty of fluctuating moods. I try to make up for it on the weekend, but even this is hard to do. I need to get used to it somehow, because if I choose to become a surgeon, residency will be just like this, only harder.
The hospital isn't exactly the set of Grey's Anatomy, but there is enough drama for even the least creative of aspiring sitcom screenwriters. Yes, medical students are hooking up with residents (even the married ones). Nurses smartmouth doctors and withhold patient services for the sake of a power trip. Interns tell off their chiefs if they're pushed too far. Certain attendings are feared and they know it, exploiting this power and furthering their reputation by cursing out students in the O.R. Security guards catch people making out in the elevators (could have been me though b/c I'm guilty of this). Scrub techs talk shit about the Russian belly dancing circulating nurse who sleeps with anesthesiologists when she's not in the room. Surgeons cheat on their wives, whisper presumptions about their colleagues' sexual orientation, and insist on a spectrum of complete silence to Britney Spears on repeat when they're holding the knife. In a word, it's awesome. I didn't think I'd fall into the drama, but I can't really help it, and admittedly, it's a little fun. After this many weeks, I'm learning to navigate the system. I'm friends with the right nurses who help me out in case I screw up in the O.R. I talk up the residents I like when they're with a demanding attending and make life a little harder for the ones I don't by asking five million questions in the O.R., most of which they can't answer.
But at the end of the day, I just want to go home. And once I'm home, the last thing I want to be doing is studying and papers. I want to be watching crap TV while cuddling with my man. The problem is I often don't know when the end of the day actually is. Some residents faithfully round at 4:30. Others don't show up, leaving the students sitting around for hours feeling like grade school kids waiting to be dismissed. There is a lot of frustration. And unfortunately, life is not without dealing with some cutthroat med students who ever so innocently steal your cases and hang you out to dry if you're getting grilled by your preceptor (if I sound bitter it's because this actually happened to me, but I ripped the jerk a new one and he won't mess with me again). But overall I like the people I work with and I'm happy that there's a certain camaraderie between those of us who shared the island for the past two years.
I'm enjoying my life right now despite living it in an extended state of sleep deprivation. New York is turning cold and I'm facing the inevitability of my first winter in two years. I'm sure I'll be singing a different tune next night I'm on call, but I'm adjusting. And at least no matter what, when I come home every day, I'm coming back to just that: a home.
This surgery rotation has been an interesting experience, albeit an exhausting one. It was easier the first six weeks when I was on subspecialty rotations. Ortho I loved and want to pursue, anesthesia I found numbingly boring, and urology was filled with dirty penis jokes cracked by the oldest grandpas of surgery. Creepiness central! Now I'm on general surgery and work twelve hour days, except every fourth day when I'm on 24 hour call. That usually turns into 28 hours though, since I can't leave the next morning until rounds are done and the chief resident lets me leave. So at the moment, I get around five hours of sleep a night and I'm usually a car wreck by Wednesday morning. Sleep deprivation has left me clumsy, inarticulate, and guilty of fluctuating moods. I try to make up for it on the weekend, but even this is hard to do. I need to get used to it somehow, because if I choose to become a surgeon, residency will be just like this, only harder.
The hospital isn't exactly the set of Grey's Anatomy, but there is enough drama for even the least creative of aspiring sitcom screenwriters. Yes, medical students are hooking up with residents (even the married ones). Nurses smartmouth doctors and withhold patient services for the sake of a power trip. Interns tell off their chiefs if they're pushed too far. Certain attendings are feared and they know it, exploiting this power and furthering their reputation by cursing out students in the O.R. Security guards catch people making out in the elevators (could have been me though b/c I'm guilty of this). Scrub techs talk shit about the Russian belly dancing circulating nurse who sleeps with anesthesiologists when she's not in the room. Surgeons cheat on their wives, whisper presumptions about their colleagues' sexual orientation, and insist on a spectrum of complete silence to Britney Spears on repeat when they're holding the knife. In a word, it's awesome. I didn't think I'd fall into the drama, but I can't really help it, and admittedly, it's a little fun. After this many weeks, I'm learning to navigate the system. I'm friends with the right nurses who help me out in case I screw up in the O.R. I talk up the residents I like when they're with a demanding attending and make life a little harder for the ones I don't by asking five million questions in the O.R., most of which they can't answer.
But at the end of the day, I just want to go home. And once I'm home, the last thing I want to be doing is studying and papers. I want to be watching crap TV while cuddling with my man. The problem is I often don't know when the end of the day actually is. Some residents faithfully round at 4:30. Others don't show up, leaving the students sitting around for hours feeling like grade school kids waiting to be dismissed. There is a lot of frustration. And unfortunately, life is not without dealing with some cutthroat med students who ever so innocently steal your cases and hang you out to dry if you're getting grilled by your preceptor (if I sound bitter it's because this actually happened to me, but I ripped the jerk a new one and he won't mess with me again). But overall I like the people I work with and I'm happy that there's a certain camaraderie between those of us who shared the island for the past two years.
I'm enjoying my life right now despite living it in an extended state of sleep deprivation. New York is turning cold and I'm facing the inevitability of my first winter in two years. I'm sure I'll be singing a different tune next night I'm on call, but I'm adjusting. And at least no matter what, when I come home every day, I'm coming back to just that: a home.