I feel the need to prolong any word ending in A with an extra "aaahhhh", in honor of our hospital cafeteriaaahhhh (no, really, that's the name), which has kindly been feeding and caffeinating me free of charge for the last five days. 

That aside, I've been conspicuously absent from my own blog since starting residency on July 1.  That's partly because I've been working, but mostly because I'm having a hard time deciding how what I write on here will have to change as I transition from medical student to resident.  All the "non-medical" stuff will stay the same.  I can still write about gear and things that make me happy and road trips and cooking and all the stuff I've always written about that make up the part of my life that happens outside of the hospital. 

But since more than half my life will be happening INSIDE the walls of the hospital, and this blog is about a doctor in the making, and not a blog about a person who like to run, cycle, hike, cook, travel, and fix up a house while also having a time consuming job, I have to talk about the medicine.  I want to talk about the medicine.  But I need to make sure I am being respectful of my patients, my colleagues, and a little law called HIPPA.  The hospital where I was a medical student was HUGE, and I felt like I had a lot of anonymity there.  It's not like any more people than before know where I work, or that I plan on giving away any more patient information than I have before, I just am a little apprehensive about giving too many details, getting hunted down by the HIPPA police, being arrested, having my license taken away forever, and becoming a public service announcement producer. 

Okay, maybe that's a bit of an overreaction?

All that said, I'm going to try to give you as much insight into the life of a family medicine intern as possible.  But I'm still working on exactly what that will look like.  That being said, here's a glimpse of what the first five days have looked like

We officially started Friday morning, although it was a short day because rotations switch on Saturdays, so our teams on Friday were totally different than on Saturday.  I'm trying to adjust to the differences between how things operated in NC, and how they operate here in IN.  There are some differences in the structure of each team that just work differently, and when you only have ever known one system, it takes a while to get used to a new one!  But I'm starting to settle in, and definitely feel like I've been here for more than a week! 

One thing I really like about our rotations here is that there are no specific ICU rotations.  While on pediatrics, if my patients goes from the regular floor to the ICU, or vice versa, I continue to follow them, just with a different attending physician.  I feel like there's better continuity, and you really get an idea of how ICU care fits into the continuity of care for patients. 

I'm also getting used to using my shiny new iPad in the hospital.  I'd say within another week, I'll comfortably be able to use it for all things related to our EMR, and won't need to haul my laptop around. 

And with that, I'm off to work on my kitchen.  I'm home early today, but on call tomorrow... gotta use the time while I have it!

Cheers,
Kari