Thrown into the Fire..

So I finished my third day of my three month Internal Medicine rotation this afternoon. It pretty much started off with baptism by fire as they say. We went through orientation and team meetings on Tuesday and found out who we're working with for the next month. I'm back at Ben Taub County General (sigh), but I think I'm going to have a good team. I'm with Vicki Feng again who was my partner on Vascular Surgery, so I already know that's going to work out fine. Our residents are pretty cool too so I think that aspect is going to be fine as well.

First Day: Our team was on call.. (double sigh). Ben Taub rotates 8 different medical teams on call on different days. Usually it's an every four day schedule with one team taking a long call, another taking a short call, and another taking a night call. Our team was up for long call, meaning that we had to admit the brunt of the day's medical patients and stay later than everyone else, well except for those that were coming on to be night call. I just admitted one patient, but of course it had to be the day's most difficult patient. I'm not really complaining. So far it's been a very interesting case and I've already learned an enormous amount about how to approach the care of a "medical" patient, as opposed to a surgery or specialty patient which is just about all I've seen up to this point. The past two days have pretty much just involved taking care of this one patient. So I think this rotation will work out just fine, it'll be a lot of work for sure, but I think it won't be as bad as everyone said it was.