Sociology

Hey reader,

today was another good day.

It started off with me coming to critical care unit rounds at 7:30am that my attending had invited me to last week. When I met them, they informed me though that there'd be a conference on pulmonary hypertension upstairs. Oh and there would be bagels a resident said. Sold!

The conference was interesting. I met Jess there. She told me she'd be doing a lot of right heart caths today so I stopped by there after the conference. There, she just asked me to check up on our old patients - the whole service! Now that would be much more of a shocker if the service had consisted of more than three patients. Muahahah!

This way I had leisure to check out morning report at 10, which was a somewhat-interesting discussion on how the U of C hospitals should extend community clinic services. Between around 11:15 and noon I actually did look up the labs on the patients and checked in on them. I was back in A700 in time for the lunch conference :D .

For the first time (in the history of the residency program as I later learned), there was actually a drug rep there who sponsored the lunch and handed out journal articles and leaflets. I conveniently (but honestly) missed the piece of paper on the wall stating that this lunch was restricted to interns and sub-interns. I guess that's why the rep did not hand out the articles to me. I'm clearly identifiable by my horrible short coat. A second-wave medstudent from Germany whom we had warned was wearing his regular long coat, so he was "welcome" to the lunch I guess.

Well, whatever. I got food.

After I sat down, somehow a conversation with the person next to me began. Turned out that he, as well, wasn't really entitled to his long, white coat. He turned out to be a sociology major, there to observe. His thesis had something to do with social networks in the medical profession and specifically how people are perceived by others, like some people that are deemed knowledgeable by their peers yet not arrogant, but pleasant to work with. Like my current attending. He had been following a lot of medical teams around over almost a year by now and only had time to come to the lunch meeting for the first time today. He, of course, was very interested in what I had to say about my impressions here and I very much enjoyed exchanging them with someone who was in very similar shoes. We both had been thrown into these "teams" that were alien in many ways for either of us. The noon conference on an interesting case of lupus complicated by myocarditis interrupted us, but on the whole we spent about 2 hours talking. And I did have the time to do that. That was so nice.

And with Brainy (who will be a prime subject for his research) and the mentoring program we're trying to build in Germany and differences between US and German systems we did not run out of discussion topics, so we said we'd meet for lunch again some time.

So around 2:30pm I strolled back to the cath lab, where Jess was doing the same thing I had left her with: right heart caths, just got done doing the seventh. While she was almost done, she asked me to page Brainy to find out when she would want to round. Turned out she was right through the doors of the cath lab in the cardiac critical care unit (nice infrastructure!) basically waiting to round with us. I actually brought her into the cath lab, because the first patient we'd be rounding on had just had pieces of his replacement heart removed by Jess.

So we saved ourselves that trip. Mentioning that second patient only evoked tirades from the female rest of the team about what a sexist womanizing jerk he was. Seeking to provoke, as I usually do, I threw in that I liked him. My attending then explained to me that the advantage of her being smaller than me was that she was perfectly positioned for a right hook to my jaw. She demonstrated the movement and I saw her point. Dude, can you imagine a German attending kidding around with a mere medstudent like that?

They ended up deciding that we didn't need to see that patient that day.

That left only one patient to see, which we did. He had been sent to the floor from the ICU today and was ostensibly doing just peachy.

The three of us subsequently chatted pleasantly for a while until Brainy sent us home around 4.

Brilliant!