it's july already?
HOORAY! Ryan has a job interview for an Urgent Care office in Greensboro tomorrow. The best part about this? It's in Greensboro! He would only have a 12 MINUTE COMMUTE! That is so much better than the 30+ minute commute he was going to have with that other job.
He also got an interview at an office in Burlington (~30 minutes away) but he turned it down - come to find out the doc has had 10 PA's working under him in less than 5 years, the longest one staying a year and a half, the shortest one working only 10 days with him. If you read his ratings on ratemd.com, they're 3/4 negative and do comment on the frequent staff turnover. Definitely not the kind of start we need. Total red flag when you lose that many providers in that short span of time.
But anyway, as for this urgent care gig, Ryan came home from the Duke ER one night and said, "you know what, I wouldn't mind doing this for a job" and just like that, decided to apply to one of the jobs on the state PA association's website. He had a preliminary phone interview this afternoon, which I assume went well because I got a text stating "Omg!!! I have an interview tomorrow!!!!!!"
Not gonna lie, I am totally jealous he may get to continue to suture or even do pelvic exams, so I'm thinking if I have time I may moonlight in Urgent Care on a per diem basis. I don't want to lose those skills. My head is exploding with possibilities. The more PA journal reading I do, the more excited I am to start my cardiology job. All the cardiology patients we had in Williamsburg gave me butterflies, since the PCP's weren't 100% comfortable with cards and I was pretty on top of my game. i.e. when the NP was doing a hospital follow-up on a man that had been discharged for syncope (passing out). She was going through his list of discharge medications and was like, "sotalol, what, was your blood pressure high?" The man and his wife were like, "No" and she looked at me, totally confused, "Have you heard of this?" Thank you to classmate Jon for doing his evidenced-based project on atrial fibrillation just a month prior, I was all over this - "It's a class III antiarrythmic medication" so right off the bat I figured he had been in atrial fibrillation. She kind of blew it off, and then about 5 minutes into the visit in reading the discharge records, there it was - paroxysmal atrial fibrillation. She looked at me and goes "Antiarrythmic! Ah, right!" I felt so useful. After so many, so so so so so many times on my rotations where I felt incompetent/burdensome/etc, it felt good to know something.
Even better? I get to work in the hospital and in the clinic. Throughout all of my rotations I absolutely could not decide what was better, and now I get the chance to do both.
What I do know coming out of this rotation year as I finish up is that pediatrics is NOT for me. It's not that I don't love the little kids and babies and even teenagers, it's just that I do not feel properly trained for a job in pediatrics. I have a ton of fun with my patients! I feel like the physician assistant training is great that you can pretty much work in any specialty upon graduation, but I feel like that has its limits with peds. The simple stuff is very simple. Ear infection? Bug bite? Common cold? No problem. The complex stuff, i.e. developmental disorders and metabolism problems and all that? OMG, I am overwhelmed. When it comes down to it, I will have spent only 18 days practicing as a pediatrician. I simply do not know enough, and half of that honestly comes from not having had children myself. I guess it's kind of like when I eventually get pregnant, I would prefer to have an Ob/Gyn who had been pregnant herself once.
Speaking of that, peds is kind of making me wish that finances were not going to be a barrier to us having kids right now/immediate future. But at the same time it gives us the freedom to be a married couple without children. I just have to say, holding a week and a half old baby today who opened its eyes and made the cutest noises ever just got to me. But then I remembered that babies feed for 15-30 at each feeding, AND they eat every 1 or 2 hours. I could use the sleep for now.
Ciao!
He also got an interview at an office in Burlington (~30 minutes away) but he turned it down - come to find out the doc has had 10 PA's working under him in less than 5 years, the longest one staying a year and a half, the shortest one working only 10 days with him. If you read his ratings on ratemd.com, they're 3/4 negative and do comment on the frequent staff turnover. Definitely not the kind of start we need. Total red flag when you lose that many providers in that short span of time.
But anyway, as for this urgent care gig, Ryan came home from the Duke ER one night and said, "you know what, I wouldn't mind doing this for a job" and just like that, decided to apply to one of the jobs on the state PA association's website. He had a preliminary phone interview this afternoon, which I assume went well because I got a text stating "Omg!!! I have an interview tomorrow!!!!!!"
Not gonna lie, I am totally jealous he may get to continue to suture or even do pelvic exams, so I'm thinking if I have time I may moonlight in Urgent Care on a per diem basis. I don't want to lose those skills. My head is exploding with possibilities. The more PA journal reading I do, the more excited I am to start my cardiology job. All the cardiology patients we had in Williamsburg gave me butterflies, since the PCP's weren't 100% comfortable with cards and I was pretty on top of my game. i.e. when the NP was doing a hospital follow-up on a man that had been discharged for syncope (passing out). She was going through his list of discharge medications and was like, "sotalol, what, was your blood pressure high?" The man and his wife were like, "No" and she looked at me, totally confused, "Have you heard of this?" Thank you to classmate Jon for doing his evidenced-based project on atrial fibrillation just a month prior, I was all over this - "It's a class III antiarrythmic medication" so right off the bat I figured he had been in atrial fibrillation. She kind of blew it off, and then about 5 minutes into the visit in reading the discharge records, there it was - paroxysmal atrial fibrillation. She looked at me and goes "Antiarrythmic! Ah, right!" I felt so useful. After so many, so so so so so many times on my rotations where I felt incompetent/burdensome/etc, it felt good to know something.
Even better? I get to work in the hospital and in the clinic. Throughout all of my rotations I absolutely could not decide what was better, and now I get the chance to do both.
What I do know coming out of this rotation year as I finish up is that pediatrics is NOT for me. It's not that I don't love the little kids and babies and even teenagers, it's just that I do not feel properly trained for a job in pediatrics. I have a ton of fun with my patients! I feel like the physician assistant training is great that you can pretty much work in any specialty upon graduation, but I feel like that has its limits with peds. The simple stuff is very simple. Ear infection? Bug bite? Common cold? No problem. The complex stuff, i.e. developmental disorders and metabolism problems and all that? OMG, I am overwhelmed. When it comes down to it, I will have spent only 18 days practicing as a pediatrician. I simply do not know enough, and half of that honestly comes from not having had children myself. I guess it's kind of like when I eventually get pregnant, I would prefer to have an Ob/Gyn who had been pregnant herself once.
Speaking of that, peds is kind of making me wish that finances were not going to be a barrier to us having kids right now/immediate future. But at the same time it gives us the freedom to be a married couple without children. I just have to say, holding a week and a half old baby today who opened its eyes and made the cutest noises ever just got to me. But then I remembered that babies feed for 15-30 at each feeding, AND they eat every 1 or 2 hours. I could use the sleep for now.
Ciao!