| Tuesday, August 18, 2009 |
| Growing up fast |
2 months of general medicine posting over and done with. 2 more to go. Around 60 more days, 20 more on-calls the most.. I'm dying to get out.
I'll admit that the subject is getting more and more interesting. I'd only started appreciating how we manage all the various medical conditions in our adult lives once I was sent to the first class ward in my hospital.
Whenever someone hears that you are posted to the first class ward, their first reaction would be, "Good-lah! Very relaxing one."
Relaxing, my foot. Hehe.. forgive my language.
I have been cursed in this medical posting. I call it the 2-cubicles/2-wards curse. I was made to take care of double the amount of patients as compared to other housemen in my ward since the day I'd joined in. When everyone is just handling 6-7 patients, I'm in charge of the well-being of 14-18 patients. When others get posted to the first class ward, they had a partner who'd share the load of their 10-16 patients. When I was there, I was left alone to take care of 19 patients and do errands for the 8 patients in the cardiac care unit for a week. It's exhausting, wei.. one time I was actually in tears behind my face mask because I was running around taking bloods, completing discharges, making phone calls, setting IV lines, taking ABGs and blood cultures, tracing clinic cards and scan results all by myself and at the same time running to the Dengue ward that I was on call in to see to admissions during the lunch break. I had nothing to eat from morning all the way to 4pm. The only thing that kept me going was, "Housemen before you had it worse. You are blessed to have this 'few' patients. Don't complain."
When my medical officer was quarantined for contact with a positive H1N1 patient, I was made temporary 'medical officer' of my first class ward by my consultant as we were short of medical officers to come and take care of the first class ward. So I had to start my day at 5.30am to go through my patients and do my rounds with the consultant. That turned out to be the most challenging moment of my housemenship. It's so different when you take on the position of the MO. You have to be more thorough, you have to present your cases better.. Because it's more embarassing to miss out on something important in front of a consultant than in front of a medical officer.
At the end of the day, I was glad for the experience. I came out of the first class ward back to the general medical ward more confident with myself and able to work faster. My consultant gave me a pat on the back and a patient told my consultant that I was the only houseman he would allow to set his IV lines. I found it embarassing, but my consultant smiled and said, "I guess your life is completely in her hands now."
Even a week after I had left the ward, the nurses came begging that I'd come back and re-set his IV line. "Dr Sasha, I was praying the whole day that you would come."
What better compliment would I need?
Now when a houseman complains about dying of exhaustion with the amount of work in taking care of their 6-8 patients, I just sit back and smile cos I've done all the work with my 15 patients by then. Haha.
Suddenly I'm quite excited to be a medical officer. |
posted by Sha @ 10:00 PM  |
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