New kids on the block

I’ve got absolutely no idea where to start in describing day 1 in hospital. The morning, and indeed most of the day up until 4pm was the usual orientation stuff – getting id issued, hospital tour etc

I’m doing General Surgery for my first rotation, along with another student, who I’ll call Kate here (all names changed to protect the guilty, remember).

At around 4pm myself and Kate paged our registrar to say hello and find out what time we should turn up tomorrow. He asked if we were close by, and when I said we were in the student’s quarters across the road he asked could we meet him in the ED in 5 mins. We were free for the rest of the afternoon, so why not?

The next few hours we were thrown in the deep end taking histories and doing abdominal physical exams of patients in the ED. Although we had just done this stuff last year, I felt so ill-prepared.

Our reg is a lovely, lovely guy, more than a little crazy and I have no doubt that in the next 4 weeks we are going to learn a hell of a lot, and have fun in the process. He is not of the old-school humiliate-your-students-into-learning way of teaching, but will teach us what we are seeing on the day, and expect us to go and learn about it that night, instead of drilling the crap out of us when it’s the first time we are seeing a given case.

Things were off to an eeirily rosy start, right up until we met our consultant. This week is not a good week to get sick because the teams across the state are basically rebuilt from the ground up: brand new interns first week out of uni, new registrars etc. Chaos.

Our reg hadn’t even met his consultant right up until the consultant walked into the room where I was interviewing a patient who presented earlier that day with a palpable mass and right groin pain. Not long after the consultant walked in, our reg walked in. Not long after he walked in, Kate walked in. Our consultant had obviously had enough of people walking in the room, because he then yelled at us all to get out. The reg was mortified and apologized that we had to witness that. He’d never seen anyone act like that before.

Since then he has talked to the consultant who has calmed down and is apparently apologizing to us tomorrow morning. Talk about drama. Let’s see how this unfolds tomorrow!