End of PM&R and looking forward to internship!

Today was my last day of physical medicine and rehabilitation, which is both a good and bad thing. Good because it means I'm that much closer to graduation, and bad because PM&R was pretty easy, and now I have my sub-internship to look forward to (ugh).

We ended the day with the typical start: checking on our patients, writing notes about their progress, and going to panel discussions, where we hear the inputs from the nurses, social workers, and therapists (physical, occupational, and speech). Fortunately, no surprises on any of our patients.

After panel we checked the board and discovered that we had four new patients coming today (that's a lot). Since there's not much that medical students can do, we wrote up the histories from the computer and copied the orders (that's about all we can do; for billing purposes, everything else has to be done by somebody who already has a degree). Then our resident sent us home early, which made me happy.

I spent the rest of my afternoon going over my internship information, which I got today. I have 13 blocks (four weeks each), which includes 2 blocks of internal medicine, 1 ICU, 1 ER, 1 pediatric clinic, 1 OB/GYN (ugh), 1 PM&R (should be a different experience at Walter Reed), 1 adult clinic, 3 electives, and 2 selectives (and no, I don't know the difference between an elective and selective). I chose research, allergy/immunology, and dermatology for my electives, and psychiatry at Bethesda and pediatrics at Walter Reed as my selectives (my other selectives choices were general surgery, cardiac ICU, general medicine, NICU, orthopedic surgery, and surgical ICU). Now I just need to figure out when to take leave. I get one month around Christmas (either the week of Christmas or the week of New Year's), so I need to choose another week for next year. I'm thinking sometime in the spring.

Obviously, there will be more on internship to come (probably a lot more to come, throughout my internship next year).