Being a medical intern

So now I've been a medical intern for a week. It's been a huge learning curve. I have to do ward rounds on my own on a regular basis. I make bigger decisions than I'm used to. I carry the arrest pager. I feel like a doctor.

Leaving my comfort zone

Today is my last day as a surgical intern. It's a scary thought.

For the last 10 weeks, I've learned the ropes of how to manage a surgical patient on the wards. I've become comfortable making decisions on my own. Now, I will be taken from the safety of the surgical ward and plunged into a world of shortness of breath and chest pain.

I will become a medical intern.

It's a scary thought. As a surgical intern, my responsibilities are limited:
1. Control pain
2. Stop the patient from vomiting
3. Make sure patients poo
4. Minimise infections

I can do those things. I know what to do. As a medical intern, I will have to deal with a myriad of diseases and drug interactions. Things will be less simple. Surgical patients come in, get whatever problem is causing them gried fixed, and go on home. Medical patients come to hospital because something complicated has happened to upset the balance of care.

Things will no longer be in black and white. But I'm ready. *gulp* I hope.

Driving panic

My boyfriend believes that living 25 minutes away from where I work is good for me. The drive should relax me, he says.

He lies.

Yesterday, some interconnector thing failed and plunged most of the state into darkness. Well, it was a 7 am, so not really darkness, but still, the power went. And with that, so did all the traffic lights. Now, driving 25 minutes up a main road with no traffic lights, no cops directing traffic, and trucks beeping at you and flashing their lights when you have only been driving for 2 months is hell. And just when you think it couldn't get worse, you have to make a right turn and then (after you've sat at the intersection and gotten some courage to brave that turn) go onto a really busy roundabout. With buses, trucks, and impatient drivers coming at you from all sides. AUGHHHHHHH!!!!!!

Panic attack central.

Somehow, I managed to get safely to my carpark without passing out from hyperventilating.

The Intern Experience

Scarily enough, I have now been practicing medicine for 2 months. In the last 8 weeks, I've experienced things that ordinary human beings never even dream of. Things that aren't glamorous enough to show on ER, either.

See, I'll let you in on a little secret: TV doctors don't act like real doctors. Especially TV interns. On all the medical shows on TV, junior doctors are in there saving lives and making very difficult decisions on their own. Bollocks. When a patient "codes" (ie, looks really sick and about to die), interns try their hardest to be the last ones there. I mean, it's part of our job to be there, but if we're the first doctor on the scene, then we have to run the show and what minimal knowledge we have disappears as panic takes over. We don't confidently run in there and bark out orders for adrenaline or frusemide or whatever drug is needed, we wait for the senior doctors to tell the nurses which drugs they want administered through the needle we are trying desperately to get in.

I think the biggest decisions regarding drug choices I make are regarding pain relief. Oh, and aperients, aka, drugs that make you poo.

And speaking of poo, I was initiated into the one intern experience that will NEVER EVER IN A MILLION YEARS be shown on prime time viewing. The hallowed practice of digital disimpaction. Also known as manual disimpaction. Doctors and nurses everywhere are now shuddering at those words and are sending "you poor thing" vibes across to me. For everyone else, digital disimpaction is the process of emptying a patient's rectum out with one's finger. You heard me, I had to scoop poo out of a patient's bum.

According to my registrar, it is an intern experience, a humiliating one, but one every doctor has to experience at least once in their life. I hope never to have to do it again.