My First Hospital Placement...

I’m happy to report that my first week on my hospital placement hasn’t been that bad. Well, I say week; I mean three days. We’re back in the medschool today and Friday for lectures and anatomy. But placement has been fun. Not overly amazing, but not terrible either. A few too many lectures and hardly any patient contact but we’re still in the introductionary phase. I did, however, take blood from a fake arm and lose my first patient. Start as you mean to go on etc. And talking of starts, before anything new (the first day, the first time I met a patient) I’ve been really nervous and anxious. Thankfully I’m fine after a few minutes and I’m not nervous the next time round. I think this can be called ‘progress’.

Next week will be a lot more hands-on. We have some bedside teaching planned, they want to teach us how to give injections and I’m aiming to be in for 8am on Monday so I can practice taking bloods. At the end of next week we can our proper timetables, which I’m nerdly excited about. We’re scheduled to do on-calls at some point and despite what people say about the dire nature of ward rounds I’m oddly looking forward to them. It’ll also be good to finally meet the team I’m attached to, and as I’m on my surgery rotation hopefully I’ll get to scrub up soon.

We also have to choose a self-directed learning project on a topic we know nothing about in the next few weeks. We’re meant to stay largely in the realm of Medicine or Surgery but we were told it would be alright if we did Paeds or A&E. Consequently I’m torn between doing something Paeds related (we don’t get a Paeds rotation till 5^th year and it’s a speciality I’m very interested in) or doing Orthopaedic Surgery (I know nothing about it, the medschool will be happier and there may be more opportunities to get hands on). Thoughts? I’m leaning towards Ortho but I may wait to see which team I get assigned to – pointless doing Ortho if I’m allocated to an Ortho Consultant.

Toodles

Lexie


Update: Assuming I'm not placed with an Ortho team I'm going to go for Orthopaedic surgery. Acutely aware that the medschool already doesn't like me (for intercalating without passing 2nd year) and I don't want to stir the hornet's nest.