It's been a while

I know, I know, I'm a horrible blogger. I go for long stretched of time without writing anything!

Let's see, I was noticing that my last post was about Jason's wedding in Oklahoma. What have I done in the past month?? I've been on the Pediatric in-patient floor in the Children's Hospital of New York at Columbia. This is a rotation that has gotten fairly unanimously panned by my co-residents. I am pleased to say that it was more enjoyable than I was expecting!

As part of training for emergency medicine, we do a number of "off service" (ie- out of the ER) rotations. The goal is multifactorial. First, the foster relationships between the ER and other services. Second, to give us some compassion towards our colleagues when we wake them up at 3am to admit a patient. Finally, to hopefully teach us a bit about the specialty.

Here is the problem: (mostly, it's reason #3). Interns in places outside of the ER and pretty much overqualified underpaid secretaries without any responsibility to make clinical decisions. In fact, on the peds ward, the intern is the equivalent of a trained monkey. Clinical decision making is actively discouraged. I wrote notes, I put in orders, and I answered mundane questions. That being said, I had a good month. I got in a 6am, got my work 90% done by 7am, rounded until noon, had an hour off for lunch (!!!!!), rounded from 1:30-2:30, finished the last 10% of my work and then went home generally between 3-4pm. In-between I played lots of solitaire and had all my decisions made for me by my seniors.

Did I just say 3-4 pm?? yep. I did. I was like being a normal person!! And with Rob currently working from home, he was there! We got to eat dinner together, go out with friends, meet other people for drinks... sigh. We've never seen more of each other than we did this past month and that was worth all the frustration and solitaire-playing that occurred while on Peds. The number of game apps on my iPhone doubled over the past month... I kid you not.

What else did I learn from peds? I'm not going to have kids anytime soon. I can do the little babies, their cute and not that bothersome. I can do the teenagers -- despite the attitude at least you can talk to them (even if logic probably doesn't apply). Everything in-between I can do without. I am sure that when I do have kids someday I will be all about every phase of their lives... just hell no, not yet.

Sum up: it was a nice, relaxing month where my days were filled with an hour and a half's worth of work spread out over 10 hours and I got to enjoy having a wonderful relationship with a fabulous, handsome man. ;) siiigh... back to work (yessss!).