Kaboom

I guess I'm not the only one struggling through these first few months of residency. I had dinner with two of the other med-peds interns and one of the OB second year residents tonight. All we could talk about is work because that's all we do. Sounds like my CCU months will be worse than peds: 5am to 7pm every day and then covering all the sickest patients in the hospital while taking admissions on call nights. It seems like patient care must disentegrate at some point. All they can hope to do, they said, is keep everyone alive until the morning when help shows up. Great.

But at least we have each other. We can decompress and laugh about things. One of the interns was doing his first presentation to the attending and during the vitals, he started to look glazed over and just fell forward...straight onto the attending. He'd fainted on the floor of the MICU. With a critical care attending on one side, three nurses trying to get a blood pressure and finger stick and the other intern holding his head. Turned out he's just gotten nervous and vasovagaled (basically locked his knees and all the blood pooled in this feet/legs and down he went). He was okay. But the attending wanted to make sure it didn't happen again so made the other intern push him around in a wheelchair for the next two hours of rounds that morning. I can't imagine!

I've nearly gone down several times in the OR as a med student. With the gown and the mask and the never having time to hydrate or eat and feeling nervous and just standing there not pumping blood back up to your brain and everything. I even almost fainted twice on anesthesia. But never on the floor. I shouldn't talk, though. It could just happen. At least I'll know I won't be the only one. Nor the first.