10. Discussing my very first Case Write-Up with the Cardiology consultant who was my home tutor for Medicine run:
Dr W: "Anna, your case write-up wasn't very good at all, I almost had to fail you. We need to go through it together."
Me: "Really, Dr W?? Oh, okay..."
Dr W: "Well, first of all, you wrote here this patient had cellulitis -- why would you treat a skin infection with fluoxetine, an antidepressant?"
Ahhh... the utter humiliation of realising, in front of your consultant, that you didn't know what "cellulitis", "fluoxetine", or "fluoxcillin" were. I've come far, oh so very far...
9. Spending the day at the Methadone Clinic in Gore -- man, what an eye-opening experience.
8. Locking myself into an empty office on the subacute psych ward, freaked out of my wits after being followed around by a (theoretically harmless) schizophrenic woman with borderline personality (hence the following me around). Silliness, I know, but it was only my first week on psych!
7. The journey I got to share in with Mr and Mrs S while I was up in Timaru Hospital for my acute med run. Mr S came in with a long-standing cough and pleuritic chest pain, and it turned out he had this massive (2L+) pleural effusion, query lung cancer. I was with them right from the beginning, at the time of admission, and over the next four weeks got to know them as one of the loveliest couples I have ever met and will ever meet in my life. They opened their hearts to me in this incredible way, and they in turn will always have a place in mine.
6. Remember that one time I tried to take a blood sample with the Vacutainer from the forearm/wrist, thinking it was the antecubital fossa I had to avoid when really it was the other way around!?! [Despite the semi-vocal concerns of the patient who turned out to be a retired nurse? Rule #1: patients sometimes actually know what they're talking about.]
5. Helping a three-fingered midwife deliver a baby at four in the morning -- walking out of the hospital doors three hours later, I was on SUCH a high.
4. My first on-call night for Surgery -- I was at the hospital from 7.30am to 11.30pm, was home for ten minutes before being paged, drove back and scrubbed into surgery for the very first time. And not only did I scrub in, but I got to assist the surgical registra on the appendectomy! My first visual tour of the abdominal cavity of a live person -- by the time I left the hospital it was almost 2am, but it was so worth it.
3. Collapsing out in the empty foyer of the Acute Operating Theatre at 12.30am, pale, shaking, mouth completely dry... literally crawling in my scrubs across the 5th floor to the water cooler. Out of eagerness (?stupidity) I hadn't had dinner while on-call, then scrubbed in to the surgery at 11pm... for half an hour I was standing there – with cold sweats, nauseous, and dizzy -- before excusing myself as unobtrusively as possible and collapsing outside where there was no one around. Scary, but, dude, what an EPIC night! lol
2. Presenting a patient I had taken a history from and examined to the on-call surgical registra near the end of the year. How utterly satisfying to realise how far I'd come, from not even knowing how to start an oral presentation and then doing almost, almost, well. :) It took a year, but I got there.
1.) And my all-time favourite moment from my 4th year of med school?? Without a doubt, being called and requested by Mr M, the breast surgeon, to assist him on a bilateral mastectomy when he had no registra around... just me. And it was AWESOME. Oh, how many times I got sprayed by blood –- Quentin Tarantino style! -- during those three GLORIOUSLY MAGICAL hours. :)
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