Weekends are half-days on at this hospital which is kinda interesting, but it makes the 6 day work week a bit more bearable so that’s nice. Today I picked up a new altered mental status (AMS) patient. These cases are always interesting because the differential for what could be causing it is so broad (also I don’t mean to refer to patient’s as their presenting problem, but in these I’m trying to depersonalize the story as much as possible). We get to do a lot of test and narrowing things down. The unfortunate part is that, at least in the cases of AMS that I’ve seen, sometimes we never get a hard and fast answer. Either it resolves because we are treating multiple things at once or it never resolves despite us addressing most of the typical things that would cause it and the rest of the work up is negative (diagnoses of exclusion are often unsatisfying to me).
Anyways we did a quick rounds with a different attending (from our sister team), finished our notes, our senior signed out and we got to go home by the early afternoon.
nANIMOv 