I had meant to write at least one post during each of my rotations, but that failed after R1 (pediatrics). Now, I've completely missed OB/GYN (R2) and I'm onto Family Medicine (R3).
Here are some general thoughts about being a third year medical student:
- My new name is "Medical Student." As in, "Medical Student! Shred this document." Or "Medical Student! There is a chart in the hall and someone needs to see that patient." Or "Medical Student, you are sitting in my chair... Now, you're standing too close behind me." I've realized that I'm pretty much interchangeable with any other person in a short white coat. The other day a resident (who I had worked closely with for a couple of weeks) mistook me for my classmate, who is blonde. The best part was that he just walked over and started listing off tasks I should do while I shook my head in defiance (I was on a completely different service at that point). In his defense, he felt pretty bad about it.
- I feel like an idiot 90% of the time. Simple tasks, like cutting a suture or making a phone call, are suddenly incredibly difficult. You guys! "Cutting a suture" sounds fancy, but it is literally cutting a string with scissors. But you have to hold the scissors a certain way. And you don't want to cut the string too long/short. Sometimes the string is thicker and more difficult to cut. And you have to use the tip of the scissors so as not to risk cutting tissue. AH! STRESS. Don't even get me started on phone calls...
- I live in a constant state of anxiety/discomfort. This is because we are constantly changing services or clinic locations; just last week, I worked at 3 different clinics, each one totally different in the way things were done from the other. Every time we are in a new place, we need to figure out our roles and expectations for us. For example, at one clinic I was simply shadowing (lame) while earlier that morning I had been independently seeing patients, writing notes, and presenting my findings to the attending physician who did very little to double check what I had done. Of course, nobody explicitly says what we're supposed to be doing; we just have to figure it out. This can be on a even more basic level. Once a fellow med student and I awkwardly hovered in the residents' room with our lunches for 10 minutes, waiting for the residents to give us permission to eat/tell us where the lunch room was. We would have asked them, but they were in deep conversation (basically gossiping) and it was not our place to interrupt.
