I survived the marathon!

I'm greatly enjoying my first weekend after successfully completing my fantastical 19-days-in-a-row school/work marathon.

My second week of this most recent CCU rotation was the CCU "days" shift, requiring me to arrive at 6 am every day (Monday through Sunday) and stay till, on average, 6 pm. Yes, I kept track of my hours, and yes, it was a total of 85 hours in 7 days.

That week was definitely my most physically and emotionally challenging week of senior year (at least so far). For one thing, though I usually do quite well with being awake in the morning, I don't actually enjoy the act of getting up in the morning (at least not at an early time), and hearing the alarm go off at 5:15 am was, not unsurprisingly, even worse than getting up at 6 or 6:30.

There was the fact that I had multiple days in a row where it was pitch black when I left the house (my, how many stars you can see at 5:45 am!) and dusk when I got home. There was the way my days started with an hour of frantically running around CCU trying to catch up on all the 7 am treatments that the overnight students hadn't gotten done. There was the unpleasant habit of other students of walking hospitalized dogs on the nearest patch of grass outside the building and not taking the extra 1.5 seconds to grab a poop bag on their way out the door, or taking the extra 30 seconds to run back into the building and grab a poop sack. Which led to me stepping in a giant pile of dog crap and getting it all over my sneakers and scrub pants a mere 15 minutes into my 7th day shift. (Fortunately, it was a slow morning, so the night nurse sent me home to change into other pants, but it was oh-so-tempting just not to come back after that. Ask me how the rest of that day went. About the same as the first 15 minutes.)

The "fun" part about CCU is that they let you do a lot of procedures. As long as the patient isn't actively trying to die, you get to put in IV catheters, urinary catheters, arterial lines, jugular catheters, etc. However, that's not the case if you're working with an intern who also wants to practice those procedures.

The other "fun" part about the CCU day shift is teaching rounds in the afternoon. You work your butt off all day until 3 pm, then you have case rounds till about 3:30, then take a half hour or so to check on your patients and make sure all the 3 pm treatments were done, then you reconvene with the after-hours students and one of the residents for discussion on whatever topic you want to talk about from 4-5 pm.

Well, at least that's the idea. On Monday, our first day of the day shift, we finished case rounds at 3:30 pm then headed out to check on patients. By "we," I mean the students. The doctors and nurses all made a beeline for the brand new ultrasound machine so they could play with it and figure out how it worked. Which they did for an hour and a half. Until it was 5 o'clock and it was too late for teaching rounds and we students had wasted 90 minutes waiting for someone to teach us something. I confess, I had a little bit of a breakdown. Remember, I worked from 3-11 pm on Sunday night and had to be back at 6 am the next morning to start the day shift. For myriad other reasons, it was such a crummy Monday that the thought of having teaching rounds (which I honestly enjoy) was really all that had gotten me through the day. All I wanted to do was learn something then go home and sleep, and instead I worked my butt off then waited around doing nothing for 90 minutes then went home. There may have been some under-my-breath ranting about not getting my money's worth from the ~$1000/week in tuition I'm paying for senior year. It was not only the wasted time and the lack of teaching rounds, but the fact that 90% of a senior student's time in CCU is spent walking dogs, cleaning cages, feeding animals, giving pills, reconnecting tangled EKG leads, and trying to get the %&#*!@ IV catheters to draw so you don't have to stick the animal for the blood sample. I don't learn anything any time I do one of those things.

Anyhow, though it's only been a week since my last day in CCU, it feels like it was months ago -- which is great. And on the positive side, I've now completed all 3 of my weeks in CCU, so I never have a rotation there again!

I've moved on to cardiology, and thankfully I'm halfway through that. Well, kind of thankfully. On the one hand, the schedule is wonderful. We have morning rounds at 8:30, followed by one appointment every hour for 2-6 hours depending on the day (Tuesdays are "procedure days" so no appointments). There are no afternoon rounds; if it's slow, we talk about a cardiology topic like radiograph or EKG interpretation. We have time to eat lunch (at actual lunch time -- novel idea!) and as long as nothing's happening, we get to head home between 4 and 5.

However, cardiology is one of my least favorite subjects. I do feel like I've learned it better by working with some actual cardiology patients than by listening to lectures, but it's still a huge challenge for me. And one of the cardiology residents is not the nicest person in the world. Additionally, my single rotation-mate is probably my least favorite person in the entire senior class.

Oh well. You can do anything for 2 weeks, right? Only one more week to go for me, and then it's on to a fun-filled month of anesthesia. Yahoo!