Go ahead and call for the the wahmbulance now because I’m about to whine for a minute.
So far third year has been nothing like I had imagined. Right now I’m rotating through a bunch of Internal Medicine subspecialty clinics and basically shadowing doctors for half a day. I had this impression of third year as being a time when I would wake up early, go pre-round on my patients, then round with my attending and his residents and interns. Get pimped, write SOAP notes, that kind of thing. So far, my experience has been nothing like that. So far I’ve had no direct role in patient care. So far the longest I’ve been in the same room as a patient is probably fifteen minutes. So far it has been more like the experience I had when I was an undergrad shadowing doctors than what I thought it would be like to be a medical student. And I’m pretty bored, to be honest.
One day I rotated through a dialysis clinic. In less than two hours, we zipped through, met all the patients there for the morning, talked for a few minutes about how dialysis patients are managed in the most superficial of terms, and then we were done. For the day. In two hours.
So far my other assignment has been to shadow a doctor in an outpatient internal medicine clinic. While it was fun to see the doctor/patient relationship at play in this context (compared to the typical context in which I see it–the hospitalized patient) again, I was only very slightly involved. I saw maybe four or five patients over the course of the morning and that was it. For the day. In the past week, I’ve “worked” a total of maybe five or six hours (not counting studying, which I’ve had ample time to do, but no context for whatsoever.)
The point of the rotation that I’m on right now is to expose us to the different possibilities available in Internal Medicine, and to that end, I suppose it’s a valuable experience. However, having it as my first rotation is pretty boring. I suppose that at some point later in the year, it would have been nice to have this rotation as a mini break of sorts, but having it first is kind of torturous. For the last two years I’ve been eager to start getting to be involved in patient care, and here, my third year has started, and I’m going to have to wait another two weeks!
Oh well, at least I didn’t start out on Gyn Onc. I have a few classmates who started out on that rotation who have to be at the hospital at 4:50am and stay until 7:00pm. Not looking forward to that one!
Tags: dialysis clinic · IM · internal medicine clerkships · M3 · whining1 Comment
[...] Memoirist over at A Med School Memoir talks about his first week during the third year of medical school. A nice glimpse into a med student’s life, although his experience so far is a little [...]