6-7

Per usual, I have been unreliable in my weekly postings. Sorry... There is a lot more to residency than meets the eye, and a lot more stuff that I'm not willing to blog about publicly, which makes for some skewed views sometimes, and I want these postings to only reflect my feelings about work, not about my personal life as well, so... i have to wait for neutral times. This is one of those times.


So, i finished up my first month in the ER without any major hangups. I went into my second month of residency, which is considered a pediatrics outpatient month. Its also somewhat of an ER month because I have yet to take any call, and I've only worked one weekend. I'd say the highlights (or low lights?) of my first two weeks, which were spent in our Urgent Care (fast track) area include:

suturing up a 10cm laceration on a 3 year old's face. I almost threw up I was so nervous to do this. And she screamed the entire time. And I learned that if you look hard enough, every suture kit has actual needle drivers instead of hemostats. too bad I didn't find that out until muuuch later into the procedure.

I learned how to remove fishhooks from fingers. Since we live on the coast of Lake Erie, people apparently are always getting hooks in their fingers. I had never seen this before. Learn something new every day

I also learned not to trust technology. I got a letter saying I totally screwed up a script for a little girl, dosing it for someone 3 times her weight. I honestly do not remember writing it like that, but the computer must have calculated it as such and I didn't double check the script, so I was in trouble. I felt horrible for my entire shift, not to mention my attending had to watch me like a hawk to see that I didn't screw anything else up. Talk about feeling horrible.

so yeah, thats' gonna be what i'll write about for that experience.

On to the second two weeks of the month (well the first week anyway, i start the second week tomorrow). Now i'm on pediatric ophthalmology. This is something i had been dreading. Everyone had said how horrible this rotation was going to be, the hours are long, you just stand there, blah blah. Honestly, its not that bad. I have actually learned things, and gotten to see anatomy of the eye in a way I never did as a student in the lab. I got to scrub in on some eye muscle cases, which is kinda neat to see, once u stop gagging and almost passing out because ur cutting up the eye. lol its a very delicate surgery... unlike the months of ortho I did.

I get to look in the backs of peoples eyes as they are dilated if they are wellbehaved. and I decided early on, that if i got nothing else out of this rotation, I was gonna work on my interactions with children, because they used to make me so nervous. by the end of the week, I was told to consider pediatric ER because I was so good with kids.... GO ME! haha

I'm definitely not an expert in looking at eyes, but I feel wayyyy more comfortable this week than i did starting residency.

So, next week i have another round of peds optho and surgery... we'll see how it goes :)