Cultural Shock!!

one week of medicine has passed...

1st official day (tues)
1. most of my pts have 5-10 medical problems on their list!
2. half of them are uncommunicative, bed-bound and severely contracted
3. my first 2 IV plugs failed! (wat a bad omen! and i thought i've sort-of mastered my IV plugs alr... turned out it's just that surgical pts generally have easy veins)
4. we take 15-20 minutes to see 1 patient.
5. a ward round entry takes 3/4 of a page or more.
6. my ward round ended at 11.40am

2nd official day
1. we must know every single detail of the pts' pmhx, even down to when aspirin was started in the previous admission.
2. discharge summaries take more than half an hour to complete
3. tracing results and trending them is extremely impt in the care of pts
4. so many social problems!

night call
1. ECG's and CE are such a chore! ( i did >10 that night!)
2. clerking a pt means writing a whole lot of pmhx, asking a full systemic review and doing a FULL examination even if u have 3 more cases waiting for you to clerk and 10 other passives to do at night.

sunday ward round
1. ward rounds can take real long esp on sunday cos there's only 1 consultant for the whole team. i started rounding on my own at 8am. my consultant only finished rounding upstairs at 12pm and came down to go through the cases with me up till 1.30pm!

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at the beginning of the week, i was kinda exasperated at how slow things were going. of course! it's such a vast difference from surgery where everything is chopchop curry pok! the sudden switch from a fast to such a slow pace was really painful...

but as days go by, i'm beginning to see some sense in it. the pts get full attention of their problems and the problems are tackled one by one. the slower pace also allows us to assimilate the large amt of info abt the pt and hence manage them properly.

haha! just 2 days ago, i was still thinking maybe i'm actually suited for surgery after all... cos i was really quite xian with the OCD nature of internists.

well, it's still too early to tell... my ex-supervisor (very inspiring one indeed... the same one who told me abt the most impt attribute in a dr) told me "never fix your opinion on a posting until you've gone through at least quite a bit of it cos the transition phase is always painful and you would not have given it a fair judgement at the beginning."