CCF ED ...

Officially done with ED .... YEA ... A big celebration ....

It's been exhausting month ... 18 shifts in 3.5 weeks with just 1 full weekend. All my free time has been spent sleeping. Even when my mom calls me, she's like "you sleeping?" and I'm like yup and somewhat coherent. I don't think I have ever been this exhausted before. I just finished my last shift and tomorrow is the start of new rotation, Nephro.

I have definitely learn that it is with difficulty to get patients admitted when they needed to and to filter patients as they come into the ED. Some patients use the ED as their personal primary physician office so they come in for everything. Some of the things they come for, we would be skeptically say "really? that is emergency?" But what can you do. It's the American healthcare with Medicare and some PCP are not taking Medicare and ED cannot refuse patients who want to be seen. What a mess and definitely needs lots of cleaning up and politics are not doing much good now. Everything is very political within the hospital.

The staff has been great. I'm definitely going to miss them. They are protective of the residents and very willing to teach. It happened to me once where I called medicine admitting team to give them an admission but they were trying to argue with me that the patient doesn't need to be admitted. I just couldn't argue back so I handed to call over to my staff. Staff pretty much laid it into them and backed me up when the admitting staff mentioned that me as a new intern doesn't know what I'm doing. I was like "Wow, what a bogus!" All the admission calls has to be approved by ED staff before the calls are to be placed. I'm definitely glad that we interns are somewhat protected even though I do expect that we will get some verbal "teaching".

The ED was so busy that pretty much at the end of each shift, I'm tired that I just want to shower and collapse in my bed. Hardly even have to time to eat during the shift. Graham cracker and peanut butter has became the staple food during shift. I probably only end up eating one real meal a day for the entire month. I lost 5 lbs and I'm pretty sure that's the unhealthy way of losing the weight I'm really trying to lose.

That's my personal goal for intern year. Lose about 30 lbs. So 25 more to go.