On the Wards

Hi, everybody!


Emory SOM provides an immersion experience for the week after orientation called "Week on the Wards". It's meant to be a taste of what you're looking forward to. It grounds you in the reason you're learning all you learn in the next 18 months. It also, I've heard, gives you a benchmark so that later when you've had tons of experience and you actually understand the pathologies being discussed, you can say, "Wow, I sure have learned a lot since that first week on the wards."

Every M1 (first-year medical student) goes to a different rotation at one of five different Emory-affiliated hospitals. There's Egleston Children's Hospital, Emory Midtown (AKA Crawford Long), Emory University Medical Hospital (???), The VA, or Grady Hospital. So, today I received my marching orders for my Week on the Wards: Grady Internal Medicine Team 6. (Go team 6.) I'm joking because this has been the farthest thing from a competitive experience.

There's a shuttle from Emory SOM to Grady Hospital. It's about 5 miles, so it takes around 15 minutes with no traffic. The shuttle is a little like a roller coaster ride. My spacial awareness is poor enough that it looked to me like the shuttle was going to collide with every car we passed. The words "barrelling" and "careening" come to mind. I like the shuttle, though. I'm fairly certain I'd survive a collision and I basically give up care for life and limb and allow the shuttle driver to perform her drive. I did get fussed at for eating grapes, which I should've had the good sense not to do. Plus, since I hadn't realized I was breaking a rule, it took awhile for me to catch on that it was me she was fussing at.

(Resumed next day while at Grady Hospital computer lab on the top floor with the wraparound balcony and well-used lounge.)

This is FUN! I am on a team with (in order of descending responsibility) an attending physician, a head resident, an intern, a third-year med student, and a fourth-year med student. (And another M1 like me.) They are AWESOME. The attending physician is an excellent teacher. She's incredibly well-spoken and seems not to let a learning opportunity slide by without snagging it. The head resident is also neat...but I think he's currently in survival mode. He appears to be bleary-eyed, and we didn't see him at all yesterday because the clinic was busy. (I have no idea how this relates to his hospital duties or if he happened to stay up all night last night.) But he's definitely wry, direct, and good-natured. The intern has only been in her internship for three days, so she's brand-new and had her first (?) night of call here last night. She seems operable today, amazingly, though she said last night seemed busy to her.

Internal medicine seems to me to be medicine for adults, general, complicated. It's not a specialty (like neurology, oncology, dermatology, etc.). The patients we've seen have ranged from very, very sick to on their way out of the hospital. I actually am not quite clear on what I'm allowed to discuss in public, so I'll err on the side of safety and not discuss any specifics. I will say that every time I've been invited to listen or feel something on a physical exam, I've accepted with joy. I have also had to resort to my coping tactic of "You're about to cry; don't cry, don't cry, don't cry" which seems to be enough to distract me from the tragedy at hand.

I have to go, but I'll write more when I can. :)