Ben-Bob in action

A picture from a recent airway workshop....

Big pants

The Emergency Department in one of the hospitals where I'm working has special cranberry-colored scrubs for ED staff. They're sharper looking than the traditional greens, so they tend to disappear from the lockers quickly. I managed to get hold of tops that fit, but for the past several weeks I've been making do with the only size of pants that I could find, which are enormous. They hang low, and I have to roll up the legs so they don't drag on the floor. Plus, I'm constantly running the risk of them being pulled down by the various gadgets and reference materials that I carry -- something that would probably tend to undermine my medical authority.

The other day our program coordinator located two pairs of the correct color in my size. Now I can finally approach my next shift with the confidence that comes from knowing that my pants aren't about to fall down.

Doppelgänger-Bob

Like many ERs, we have an electronic board where residents put their initials next to the names of patients they're seeing, but the other night I noticed my initials next to a patient I'd never seen or heard of. I clicked for more details, finding that the initials belonged to another resident who, coincidentally, shared my initials. And who happened to be sitting next to me. And who turned out to have come to medicine later in life, after another career. In music. Classical music. In Boston.

How's that for a coincidence?

Ups and downs

I wish I could think of something original to say about starting as an intern, but I'm finding that the cliches are more or less true. One of the things that I'm finding most difficult is how up and down it is. Sometimes I leave a shift feeling like a complete idiot, and sometimes I leave feeling like I might even have done a tiny bit of good. But no matter what, it's all-consuming.

Newbie's blues

It can be hard to settle into a new job. The other night I wrote some orders for a patient and got his hospital ID card, since all patient documents need to be embossed with the patient's information for safety reasons.

I found the swing-arm device that imprints the paper from the card, put in the paper and the card, and pushed down. Except that it wasn't the embosser -- it was a stapler. So now I've stapled the order sheet to the ID card that everyone else needs. And there I am, struggling to pull the staple out of the plastic without ripping the paper, and people are starting to wonder what I'm doing.

Finally managed to sort it all out while projecting, I'm sure, the sort of calm competence that we expect of our healthcare professionals.

First shift.

Very humbling.

Must sleep.

More later....

Expectations

As you may know, Lady M and I are sharing quarters with a fellow expatriate Iowan and newly-minted Pediatrics resident, tentatively dubbed the J-Bomb (although it's a little unclear whether this moniker refers to him or his car).

In any case, his incoming intern class got an inspirational talk today from a doctor who told them that it was important to lower their expectations. For example, she said, when she wants to leave the hospital at 5 pm but is disappointed not to leave until 5:30, she just thinks "well, I might not have left until 6." Reasonable enough, thought the J-Bomb. So she went on to say that since the residents won't be going home at all, they should simply give up all of their expectations, and then not going home won't bother them. No expectations, except of course that they should have the highest expectations for their work.

Our man in Peds reports that he and his fellow interns were left uninspired.

Iowa connection

The disastrous flooding in Iowa has cast a sad shadow on the recent move, but Iowa continues to loom large in a happier way now that residency activities have started. One of my EM classmates went to college at Grinnell, and one of the Internal Medicine interns is from...Ridgeway!

Oriented

The first day of orientation for new interns was today. We received our long white coats and a lot of information. The thing I remember most clearly was a slide from the presentation by the hospital's safety officer showing a model of the hospital in flames and overrun by dinosaurs. Should be an exciting year.