Saturday, January 10, 2009

Saturdays with Cloy

Like Tuesdays with Morrie. Get it? Ha. Anyway - today my preceptor partner and I went to "the Baptist" as the patients call it to get more experience and to take our first history. Of course it helps that we didn't even realize we were doing our assignment while we were working on it. A resident asked us to go in and finish a history he had started on a patient while we were there. Fortunately it was a very nice man (or was it a woman? You'll never know thanks to HIPAA. And yes that's how you spell HIPAA. I checked. ) who happened to know 2 of our classmates! It's such a small world.

We showed up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, sort of, at 8AM this morning dressed in our Sunday finest and white coats. My partner tried calling Cloy (our preceptor) who had told us he'd be at the hospital "around 8 or 9." Usually when someone says this to me it really means 7:30. So we got there at 8. Cloy didn't answer. I called 15 minutes later and he answered - very sleepily. Whoops... I woke him up. 2 of the things I hate doing the most are talking on the phone and bothering people. I had done both simultaneously. Awesome. It wasn't really a big deal though. He said he'd be in in an hour and told us to page a resident and tag along. Do we know how to page anyone? No. Did we figure it out real fast? Yep. We paged a resident and he miraculously showed up in less than a minute. I was impressed.

Then we basically hung out with the residents for a little while and got the run-down on all their patients that were currently at the hospital. They ate breakfast and then we rounded on all the patients. That was fun and a lot faster than I thought it would be. They said it was an unusually low amount of patients though, so that's nice. Cloy showed up at around 9:30 or 10. The residents were all really nice and taught us a few things in their spare time between patients. All in all it was a pretty good day. We left the hospital a little before 2:00 and I meant to go straight home and write up my patient's history while it's fresh, but that didn't happen.

I had to take a hot pocket and diet coke break and watch a little tv. Now it's 6:00 and I've been working on this history for too long. I hate how being a perfectionist or OCD, whichever I am, can make me take so long. I just want to get everything perfect and it's hard to get started on things in fear of messing them up. This is not a hard assignment and in just a few years we'll be doing several a day and just spending 10-15 minutes on them probably. There's just some pressure there when you know you're getting graded and you're trying to impress (or at least not embarrass yourself). Anyway - that's what I'm doing on Saturday night. Jealous?

1 comment:

Ewok said...

I'm impressed you went to do ICM on a saturday. I always enjoyed my time with the Baptist people. Although steer clear of the one attending that's all about sports medicine (You'll probably know who I'm talking about the minute you see him...really tall and thin and probably in his 40's). He'll make you walk up 9 flights of stairs. I'm hoping to not get him as a med student because he expects you to follow.