Family Medicine ED – Day 6

After a week in the ED, definitely feeling a bit more comfortable with the flow. I feel like I’m being treated like an intern by the attendings and staff, probably in part because the new interns just started late last week so some people do actually think I’m a first year resident. There was a new senior resident today, a fresh 2nd year, so similar to last week he was kinda hands-off so I got to work more directly with the attendings. The good part of that is I feel more independent and like a true sub-I, the bad part is if I say something dumb the attending will know I’m dumb without it being filtered through a resident. Though so far it’s been going ok. Today was pretty standard in terms of the cases I saw, nothing too interesting from a medical standpoint. I had to interrogate someone’s implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD; I had to figure out how to do this first). I also had a patient with suicidal thoughts which I haven’t had since my psych rotation and as well as an individual with body lice which I hadn’t seen since I was working with Doctors Without Walls. The days go by fast and there is a certain satisfaction about doing acute interventions to make someone better in the ED. At the same time, there’s a lot of cases where we aren’t actually solving people’s issues, just getting them stable enough to find someone who can help them. Pluses and minuses, but overall I’m having a good time.