Thursday, August 1, 2013

"Turn your head and cough, please!" Day 12 - Do you mind?!

Before even coming to work today I knew that another DaVinci operation was happening. As exciting as the operation is, I was not looking forward to the back breaking standing around. And to be honest, if you aren't operating yourself, you've seen one and that is enough for a while.

Do you mind?
So when the attendings and assistants were discussing how much work had to be done in the outpatient department and admissions I offered my help. The attending was pleased and said he was about to ask me if I'd be willing to skip the operation anyways. Booyah! I beat him to it though and now I was the nice student who offered her help without having to be asked. :D

This was probably the day that went by the fastest. I was doing something almost non-stop.

Welcome to the circus!
Dr.K was in charge of admissions and outpatients. He said that admissions where now my thing and that I should do as much as I could and was allowed to and then he would do the things that needed a doctor (such as patient consent for operations). He really let me be very independent. It was great!

In general, I would look through the patients files and gather the info I needed to get a picture of why the patient was even coming. Then I'd get my admission papers collected and go see the patient.

"Hello there, I'm Miss Hasselhof and I'm in charge of admissions today"
First up was taking the patient's history. Usually the nurses will then draw blood and get a urine sample. Since the place really was a circus with all the work that needed to be done I decided to do the job to help them out. This also made me even more independent. If necessary, I would do ultrasounds of the kidneys and bladder, print the pictures and write down my findings. Then I would get everything ready for Dr.K so all he had to do was come in, do the patient consent form and the patient was good to go. Yay teamwork!

My 8 patients probably could have been taken care of a lot quicker than they were if 3 other doctors weren't using the rooms parallel to me to get stuff done. Nonetheless I was always busy.

Job description: where do I begin?
I felt like in addition to playing doctor, I was call center worker (that phone was ringing non-stop), office manager (I had the general overview of all the patients present and was sending doctors in their respective rooms) and nurse (I helped out with their activities since I saw how much they had to do as well).

It was a fun day.  :)

I headed home at 3:30PM to get some sleep in before my night shift. So here I am again in the hospital because its just so lovely ;)

I'll see how I do with one hour of sleep tomorrow....

Baci, V

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