D-day

Do. Not. Get. Sick.

Today is July 1. Beginning today, everyone in training at the hospital is officially new to their post. Medical students just became interns. Interns just became Residents. Chiefs just became attendings. Everybody is new. Especially the interns. Often, they are new to being an MD, new to this hospital, maybe even new to this time zone.

It's a little intense. To quote many of my peers, coworkers, and observers in the vicinity, today was just "one big clusterfuck."*

*clusterfuck (plural clusterfucks) (vulgar) A chaotic mess that might be compared to group sex, in which participants are so intertwined and intermingled that they might penetrate each other rather than their intended target. Its more precise usage describes a particular kind of Catch-22, in which multiple complicated problems mutually interfere with each other's solution. The looser usage, referring to any chaotic situation, probably prevails. Thanks, wikitionary. You learn something new every day, huh?

Here's an example: Everyone switched on to VA service today (except the two students, including myself), but no one could find our census (with our patients' info on it), only one of the interns (and no residents) could log into the electronic medical record, and Jacob and I still don't have half the access we need either. We just rounded and scrawled everything on scrap paper until we could access the records.

Another example (and one I find particularly entertaining): Two of my classmates are on UK medicine wards. Interns on medicine typically split up the patients between themselves and write a SOAP note on every patient. SOAP stands for Subjective (what the patient says), Objective (what the data/labs say), and Assessment/Plan (what your assessment of the problems are and what you're going to do about it). One intern today said "What goes in the assessment and plan?" then followed up by asking "Do I have to write one of these every day?"

I think dumb questions are okay sometimes, but sometimes I think you should just figure it out yourself, or at least err on the side of caution until you figure something out.

Oh dear.

I repeat: Don't get sick.