Finishing My Second Week of Surgery

The rest of this week has been a lot easier than last week was. Wednesday, I scrubbed into a pediatric hernia surgery. That was an incredibly pleasant experience compared to scrubbing into adult surgeries. The peds OR areas are decorated with cartoon characters and colors instead of being stark and white. The scrub nurses are really nice. (For anyone who has never done a surgery rotation, the phrase "nice scrub nurse" is almost an oxymoron.) I didn't get to do very much besides retract since the patient was a little kid, but it was still a good experience nonetheless.

Yesterday, I lucked out and got a study day because my attending was off doing surgeries at one of the satellite family centers. I'm still working on those surgery prompts for the oral exam, which I have to be ready to take in nine days. But I got a lot done yesterday, because the only clinical thing I had to do was go on rounds in the morning and evening.

I also had to present a patient at morning report today. Since I didn't have a really good surgery case, I decided to present the patient with abdominal pain who I saw on my first call night, the one who turned out not to have a surgical problem at all. The presentation went well, and the surgeon who was leading the discussion wrote me a very complimentary eval. Afterward, we had our medicine presentation, and then our seminar was on diabetes. That was a bit crazy, because the original seminar leader was sick or something and didn't show up. So the block leader led the seminar instead. To her credit, she did a pretty good job, especially considering that she didn't find out she was going to have to do this until the last minute.

This afternoon, we had a research seminar on designing questionnaires. I don't think I'd have liked it even if I wasn't sleep deprived and cranky from being on surgery, but that certainly didn't help. They also made us do this stupid group exercise. All in all, I am really starting to hate these Friday afternoon seminars. I understand that physician scientists need to know things like how to tell if a questionnaire is properly designed. But I still don't think it's necessary to make us sit through three hours of it on a Friday afternoon when it could have been covered in one hour. Plus, I still had to go on evening rounds afterward, so I didn't get much of a break.

Tomorrow night I am on call again with the same senior resident I had call with last time. Amazingly, I am actually looking forward to taking call this time. It doesn't hurt that I'll get to have Sunday off afterward, either. :-)