Getting into the groove

cue the Madonna music . . .

Really, though, its a week into intern life and I've finally got a schedule down. It goes something like this:
5am: wake up, walk dog
6:15am: arrive at hospital, change, head to morning report
7:30am: start daily work (scopes, or nutrition rounds)
7:30pm (give or take): get home, walk dog
Then I've got until about 9:30 or so to get my stuff done. My goal every night is to do 30 minutes of reading, 30 minutes of workout, eat dinner, and hang out with the BF and Maddie. It doesn't sound that bad, but I've got to be efficient to get it all done.

I should point out that although 6:15am sounds early to a lot of you, its not early at all to get to work as an intern. That will only happen for me this month. After that, I've got patients to see in the morning before my team gets to the hospital to start their workday. As an endoscopy resident, I'm the only resident on my team, and so I round whenever I want. That's usually in between scopes. And because I don't have any patients to call my own, I don't have to see them super early in the morning, to make sure work gets done for the day. I love it.

But I do miss having a team. It gets a little lonely, and a little scary when I get paged about a problem I have no idea how to handle. But I muddle my way through somehow, and get help when I need it. Like last week, for example, when I was called about a patient who's PEG tube was leaking gastric contents all over her bed. Yummy. Oh, and not just any gastric contents . . . this lady had C. diff, so it stank unbelievably. If I think about it, I can still smell that stuff. Ugh.

Cutting my daily workout from an hour to 30 minutes has been sad. But really its all I can make time for. I sort of count my running around the hospital as a workout too. My endoscopy clinic is on the first floor, the ORs are on the second, and I have patients on floors 3, 4, 5 and 6 at most times. So I'm quite the stair climber.

One more piece of good news: I have vacation in August, so I will be in WI for at least a week. I'll be emailing my demands to see many of you while I'm there. So stay tuned. It sort of stinks to have vacation this early in the year, but I already miss lots of people, and have a family wedding that I didn't want to miss, so I'm glad I got some time off!