Lasciate Ogne Somina, Voi Ch'intrate

For those of you whose conversational Latin is a bit rusty, This post's title is stolen from the famous phrase posted at the Gates of Hell in Dante's Divine Comedy. My slightly altered version translates to:

Abandon all sleep, ye who enter.

This is a fitting admonishment to all medical students about to start clinical rotations.

As first days go, mine wasn't too horrible, although it began at the barbaric hour of 0600. (Actually this will seem like sleeping-in from now on, since I didn't have to report today until 9am but tomorrow I have to be there by 0700! ) After discovering a short-cut of sorts to the bus stop, the walk this morning in the light rain was only a few minutes. Now I don't necessarily agree with all of Mayor Bloomberg's politics, but he must have taken a page out of old Il Duce's handbook because my bus was at the stop at the scheduled time and the trip took almost exactly as long as advertised, 45 minutes. So far so good. I ran into several AUC students and I actually wound up in the same group as a Nick, a classmate, so I will have a buddy to commiserate with for this 6 week rotation.

The orientation at Wyckoff was closer to a series of Chinese fire drills than any kind of organized affair. It began with cramming what seemed to be well over 100 students into a conference room with seats for only roughly half that number. Later there was a bunch of standing around and waiting, gnashing of teeth, and several venue changes (I counted 4) but once we finally broke up into our respective services, things went pretty smoothly.

Family Medicine seems to be a pretty good 1st rotation from what I can tell so far. It is sort of like Internal Medicine -"lite" since the rotation is only 6 weeks vs 12 and the hours are much better. You get to see a little of this and a little of that and even some outpatient clinic stuff to get your feet wet. The Doctor-to-student ratio is much lower and it seems this is a great time to brush up on your physical exam skills and note writing while you have more face time with the docs.

Schedule-wise, I am starting out with 2 weeks in-hospital 7a-7p, then 2 weeks of nights : 7p-7a but the pretty cool thing is that nights are only every other day for instance go in Monday 7p-7a finishing up Tuesday morning, you are not due to come back in until Wednesday night. Pretty nice! Speaking of Wednesdays, there is mandatory conferences every Wednesday from 2pm-5pm. After the 2 weeks of nights I will finish up with 2 weeks of out-patient clinic which is only either 8am-1pm or 1pm-6pm so not too bad there either. Generally speaking, the in-hospital rotations will be 6 day-a-week affairs with the senior resident determining which students will cover Saturday and which ones will do Sunday. My plans of coming home Every weekend are going to be "altered" a bit. I will request tomorrow that I be put on for this Sunday so I can go home and be a chaperon at the Relay for Life event that Meagan is captaining a team for. The hours are from Friday at Midnight until either 5am or 7am! She really loves her daddy!

Hopefully I will be able to get back to Philly for some time the 2 weeks I am on nights and the 2 weeks of out-patient. I may only wind up staying here for 1, maybe 2 weekends- I guess we will have to see.

Tomorrow they will actually let me play with patients, yay!

Oh, I almost forgot, I may actually have a roommate now after all. Yesterday afternoon he showed up. He is French and a student at UCLA out here doing an internship for the summer. We only spoke briefly as he had paid for a hotel room in Manhattan for a couple nights prior to getting the last-minute room opening here; so he dropped off some suitcases and headed back to a very expensive, albeit infinitely more comfortable, hotel room. As of this evening his bags are still here and, as far as I can tell, he hasn't been here and unpacked anything, so we will see how long this one lasts hahaha.