I had the angriest couple of hours yesterday.
First off, PMS. That never helps anything.
And I’m not having the best time on this rotation. It’s a wonderful group of students and my clinicians are great teachers but…I’m kind of bored, confused, and stressed all at the same time. I’m just having a hard time being enthused about dermatology. There’s this sense of urgency that I don’t understand. And I know part of it’s due to the time crunch we have but none of our cases are an emergency so I don’t see the point of getting all stressed out (yet I still do). Our exams take SO long. The history questions we as the clients are so involved. I feel like we have 3 times more questions to ask than any other service, which makes sense and is important because derm issues are very complicated, but owners start to get antsy and impatient. Then the dermatological exam itself takes forever. Mine less so than those of the dermatologists. And I feel like my histories and physical exams get so jumbled, especially since a lot of owners end up changing their story several times during the history-taking process, so that when I’m reporting to my clinician I end up sounding a lot more confused than I actually am. It’s frustrating. I’m a person who really needs to write things down in an organized way in order to make a good report but with these long histories that we enter into the computer system as we’re taking our history, there just isn’t time for me to do so.
So yesterday we had a fairly light case load but one of my cases from a few days ago was keeping me busy. She was going to have surgery but had some abnormalities on her bloodwork, so I had to run around and talk to other doctors from other departments to ask their opinion, next steps for this patient, etc. Then, once I came back to relay the information I received to my clinician, it was lunch time and she gave us a 30 minute lunch break because she wanted us to come back and teach us some stuff during the time we didn’t have appointments. Normally, half an hour is more than enough. But I had to call the owner of this patient to give her our recommendation and see if we could schedule the patient for imaging later that day (otherwise I would call later in the day) since there was an opening. However, after a somewhat long conversation, she decided she needed to speak to her husband and she’d get back to us.
Then I had to run to the human pharmacy to pick up my birth control. My school offers wonderful health insurance but we have to get our meds from their pharmacy, which have limited hours and I had to pick up my drugs that day. So I ran there and there was a line....and then when it was my turn, the lady helping me took forever. Blarg. No worries, I remained polite. Just because I was having a bad day didn’t mean I needed to take it out on her.
Then I ran back to the veterinary hospital, had 4 minutes before we were supposed to meet up with our clinician for teaching rounds, so I shoved a granola bar in my mouth and that was lunch. It’s so frustrating because the Dermatology department is the only department that doesn’t have its own conference room where you can eat. They got the short end of the stick in that sense. All other departments have separate conference room that don’t see patients and their germs, etc so eating is OK in those areas.
And THEN my clinician was late.
Cally SMASH!
I kept my cool, though. No one realized how angry I was, which was good. Later in the day, I had to try very hard not to laugh sardonically when two of my rotation mates were complaining about being sooo “hangry” even though they had gotten their lunch break and eaten a full meal.
Anyway, I did end up having an interesting case that I worked with on another student and our clinician gave us really good feedback, so there’s that at least.
My day ended at 7pm, having started at 8am, and I still hadn’t gotten to eat. Thankfully, Aaron, saint that he is, brought me a giant, delicious sub sandwich without my asking when he picked me up because I had sent him some short, complainy texts earlier, and I devoured it. I love him (for more than just sandwich bringing :P)!
Today I have done very little. I slept in and have basically spent all day wandering the internet and online stress shopping (oops). I listen to 3 short lectures on horse disease offered by my national boards study program, so I was every so slightly productive. Tomorrow, we’re going to hang out with Kat and Genevieve at Genevieve’s apartment, which has a pool. Should be lovely.
Oh, and yeah, I’m behind on PB. Spent some time catching up a little today, but not sure how far I’ll get. Nothing new there, though, I suppose :P
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