I did my first real injection today… kinda. This morning my attending for the day pulled me out of the room while I was with a patient and said that one of the attending I’ve worked with was ask if wanted to come to a knee injection with him. Of course I jumped at the opportunity. On the walk across the clinic I was getting a bit nervous trying to remember all the steps for cleaning the site, pulling up the medication, switching needles, and injecting. When we got to the patients room though, everything was pretty much prepped and my attending pulled up the meds. There was already an X on the injection site, despite me palpating the other side of the knee for practice. He handed me the syringe and I went for it. It was a little tougher to push the needle through than I was expecting, having only practiced on dummy knees and my only other experience with injections was intramuscular injections when I was giving COVID vaccines over a year ago. Both my attending and the patient said I did a good job though so I’ll take it, even if it honestly would’ve been pretty hard for me to mess up given that 95% of it was done for me. Nonetheless is was a good first experience and a good way for me to gain some confidence for if I ever have to do it for real (which I doubt will happen during this rotation, but ya never know).
After that it was a pretty standard morning, except I did have a well-child check which was some fun review. I got to use my dinosaur-in-the-ear play and even took it a step further and when I was leaving the room “pulled” a dinosaur sticker out of his ear.
In the afternoon I just had conference. We really need to change how we view effective and professional transfer of knowledge in higher education (and to perhaps education in general). I feel like there’s this view that in order for a presentation to be professional and effective, it need to be boring and lack spice. There needs to be a lot of words, and the presenter just needs to repeat everything on the slide verbatim. This goes against what I think many of us were taught about presentations, but it certainly doesn’t show. Though it also may be a product of limited time. Students and people who have other jobs or don’t work in education may not have the time to put together a presentation that is thoughtful prom both a content AND delivery perspective. The presentations from the interns and residents today were very thoughtful content-wise, but less so in terms of delivery and so some of the important content gets lost. Or maybe I just need to drink more coffee.
nANIMOv 