Peds Wrap Up

Today was my last day on pediatrics. I'm kind of glad it's over, but it wasn't as bad as I had imagined.

I actually had a few cool/new experiences on peds:
1. Call - essentially means spending the night in the hospital in case anything exciting happens over night. The two times I took call....nothing exciting happened, so I slept from midnight to 5am, and went to rounds greasy and with bad breath. It's never a good thing when you drink coffee to try to hide your morning breath. Next time I'll bring a toothbrush.

2. Drawing blood - I didn't do this to a patient, but one of the interns decided that I should learn how to do this.....on HIM. Crazy person. (For a little background, I hate needles. I passed out in the parking garage at KU after getting my immunizations before starting med school.) It turned out to be okay though and I think I did a fairly decent job. I got the vein on the first try and Dr. Crazy Man said that it didn't hurt.

3. Scalpel Please - we had a patient with a deep abscess that we decided should be drained and cultured. You couldn't really see it just by looking, but you could definitely feel it. The attending and the resident decided that I should be the one to weild the scalpel. This made me a wee bit nervous. Expecially after they both pointed out that the abscess was near the spinal cord, you know, so as to remind me that one slip of the hand could cause some serious neurological problems. I managed though. We got enough goo to get a good culture and I'm pretty sure the kid walked out okay.

So, those were my cool peds experiences. I also got to spend some time in peds cardiology which was way cool. If I had to pick a specialty right now, it would be at the top of my list. I might have to do adult cardiology though because I don't know if I could make it through 3 years of general peds residency.

I'm starting on OB/GYN next week. I think it will be exciting delivering babies and all, but I've heard that the schedule is pretty demanding. If I'm reading the schedule right, I'll be on the night shift for the first week - which means I'll get to the floor at 6:30pm and stay until 8:00 the next morning. I might not see Danny for a while :(

In other news....the elections happened. Not the outcome I had hoped for, but I'm trying to remain optimistic. Obama won a few brownie points with me today when he said that they wanted to adopt a shelter dog for their new pet. For a moment I imagined a one eyed, shaggy dog like Charlie running rampant through the White House....it made me smile.