Update

Okay, so I now I'm doing an absolutely horrible job of keeping my blog up-to-date, which kinda defeats the purpose of having one in the first place. Here's what I've been doing the last month or so:

I'm back on Ward 75, the general medicine ward, this time on Medicine Green Team instead of Blue Team. There's absolutely no difference between the teams, except which team room (office) is used. We, and the other medicine services, actually (there are five: gold, green, blue, white, and red), have been taking quite a hit every time we're on call. Being on call means that if someone comes into the hospital who needs to be admitted to a medicine, they go to the on-call team. The cap for admitting patients to one team is ten, and after that, the senior night float admits them to other teams. Everyone has been hitting the cap, which is a lot of patients, and we can't seem to get them out of the hospital. We're on call again tomorrow night, and still have nine patients on the board. That means if they can't discharge people today (it's my day off today), we could potentially have nineteen patients on Friday, which is far too many.

I have had a few interesting patients, though. There was one the last time we were on call, a nurse with a thigh mass who we essentially admitted so she could get an MRI overnight ("expedited work-up"). Well, the MRI read wasn't as good as anyone hoped, and we called ortho (whom she had already been seeing for this thigh mass, as she had had it for two months), and today they're taking her to the operating room to do a biopsy. In other words, after looking at the MRI, they're concerned in might be a bone or muscle cancer of some sort.

There was another, a ninety-year-old man who really liked to talk (and was very sharp, for any age, especially ninety; a former Special Forces captain during WWII and clinical psychologist during the Korean War, retired at major), and during one of our longer-than-necessary conversations, he asked if I had gone to USUHS. When I informed him that I recently graduated from Ohio State, he got an incredulous look on his face.

He graduated with a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Ohio State in 1951. Apparently, Buckeyes really know how find each other.

For the most part, unfortunately, the patients aren't interesting, just frustrating, and I'll be very glad when I'm walking out of the hospital Sunday, because that will be my last day on Ward 75--forever.

As far as other aspects of my life, well, it's difficult to have a social life while working eighty hours a week, spending every fifth night in the hospital, and only getting one day in seven off. The one date I went on (blind date, set up by a friend), was a complete disaster. He asked how long I "have" to be in the Army and then started talking about how things will be different once I get out. At one point, I made some joking comment about something about my uniform, and he said, "Well, at least you don't have to wear it at work."

???

Just what does he think being an Army doctor is? When I told him that I do, in fact, wear my uniform almost every day to work, he thought that was the stupidest thing ever. So overall, he seemed to think being a doctor in the Army was the worst thing ever, and I must be counting down my days until I can hang up my uniform and be done with it for good. I don't know if I'll be hanging up my uniform in eight years--it all depends on the opportunities presented to me at that point. For what I want to do in my career, I may be staying in forever, and I don't appreciate some guy I just met assuming he knows otherwise.

In other words, no second date.

So, in the meantime, I've been pretty much doing all that I can to keep my head above water as I finish up this rotation, and spending time with my fellow intern friends whenever I can, which isn't all that easy, when it always comes down to getting schedules to line up. On Monday, I start on PM&R (Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation), so that will be a nice change of pace.