Day three

Today was better. Finally less of a haze.

Also, since I didn't have a meeting at 10:30 this morning I finally could go to the so-called "morning report" from 10am-11am.

But first, when I came in this morning, Jenn had another patient for me. After a little begging and convincing she gave in and allowed me to see this patient together with Justin instead of alone so I'd finally see how they actually do these consults.

So after checking in on my patient from yesterday I paged Justin, he said it was fine that we'd see that new patient together and we went to morning report.

This was one of the places where there was free food.

I had a bagel with cream cheese and two glasses of orange juice while listening to someone reiterate the different forms of machine ventilation and their advantages and drawbacks. They do seem to have quite different preferences here from those in Germany but that's not really surprising.

After that, Justin and I went to see that hypertensive patient in one of the ICUs and it seemed that he didn't do too many things differently. When we were just about done with what we could get out of the computer and from the charts the patient just started getting physical therapy, so we went back up to "A700", the residents' area, to read up on the causes of secondary hypertension and wait for lunch and .. uhm .. this noon conference of course.

This one was actually on chronic renal insufficiency. I would have liked to listen to it all but I still had to see both my hypercalcemic and my new hypertensive patient before rounds at 1pm, so I just grabbed a can of soda and one of the hundreds of Potbelly sandwiches lying around (yes! Those delicious ones I told you about weeks ago!), gulped it down and went to see the patients at 12:15.

Contrary to the past two days, I felt better prepared for rounds today even though it were three patients that I would report on. Of course, I still would have liked to have more time to think it all through but at least I wasn't missing anything obvious today that I could have thought of myself. That was a start.

Rounds were good, I had some more answers today and had more instances where it must have at least seemed like I halfway knew what I was talking about.

We actually went to see a renal biopsy Jenn had taken yesterday with a pathologist today. This took place in a room where about a dozen binoculars were connected to a single microscope. I wished our university had that kind of money.

I have to go through this rather quickly since we got done rounding at 4:15pm today and as I said, CS invited us to dinner. It's 4:50pm now and CS is going to pick me up at my place around 5:15pm. Since I'm in the residents' workroom now I'm going to have to get home and changed by then.

So please excuse my brevity but I know that I probably wouldn't get to blog today anymore otherwise.

And Jenn has clinic duty tomorrow and asked that we do show up early tomorrow .. early as in 8-8:30am .. heheh. Bad news is though that Justin is on call tonight, so he will be post-call tomorrow. That means I may get stuck with more than one patient tomorrow morning. So maybe I shouldn't have too much at the bar tonight.

Anyway, have a good night for now.