Last Week

Having spent close to 3 years in the hospital system, I have just one more week before I permanently leave.

General practice here I come!

But honestly, these past 3 years have been challenging, rewarding, and I must say I have come a fair way from being a medical student.

In 1 weeks time, I am no longer a resident anymore. I’ll be thrust into the world of general practice, where almost anything is fair game. I’ll be a registrar, and that means being thrown in the deep end.

One more week of obstetrics and gynaecology. I don’t think I’ll miss the postnatal checks, because they were very mundane. But I suppose I will miss scrubbing in for cases. Next week will be the last time probably I scrub in to assist an operation again.

Much work lies ahead… Hopefully I’ll be ready for it!

Back to the Surgical Wards

I’m back on that horrible horrible surgical ward, the ward of bad memories from last year. The constant buzzing in the ward of bells and alarms is all too obvious. I see some familiar haunting faces. Faces that give me a nauseating feeling of disgust.

It’s a good thing that those haunting faces are on the other side of the surgical ward. I’m looking directly back at those past surgical consultants that gave me such a hard time last year, from the desk of the orthopaedics team.

For the mean time, I’ll be looking after bones, joints and wounds, as opposed to botched up colon resections, dehisced surgical wounds, and bladder to abdomen fistula-from-bad-surgery (all of which I really did encounter during my surgical time last year) thank you very much.

Our orthopaedics patients are few in number (sometimes only 5-6 on the ward), generally quite well post op (joint replacements – what can go wrong?), and have far fewer comorbidities. Our team is fairly large too (3 residents vs 4 for surgery, but much fewer patients, and way less clinics).

Some of my registrars still suck, with one even being a registrar from last year. He assigns some of the most time wasting tasks for me, at one time, phoning me up and slowly dictating all the patient details to me so that I could write up a theatre booking form. It was painstakingly slow, dictating the patient’s name, and at times, missing a few letters so that I’d ask him to repeat again. Makes me question the registrar’s judgement in that firstly, it would be much quicker for him to fill the damn form out himself, and secondly, he’s not only wasting his time, but also the resident’s time, therefore wasting two people’s time.

Some things in orthopaedics remain the same as surgery however. The mad frantic rush in the morning ward rounds as we jump from patient to patient, and the unclear plans for VTE prophylaxis, as each consultant likes different VTE prophylaxis use. On the other hand, a lot has changed too. There are way fewer MET calls on our side, or constant requests to review unwell patients, and way less phone calls from other staff hurrying us to get certain jobs done.

Yeap, I enjoy orthopaedics way more than surgery. I’m just thinking how much it sucks for the surgical residents now, but I can empathise with them at least. Been there, done that.