"like sand in an hour-glass..."

Today was a good day.

Boy, was it a mission getting out of bed at six this morning, lemme tell you! The combination of the utterly freezing temperatures outside and the 5.30 - 7pm tutorial the night before. But I am so glad I didn't give in to the overwhelming desire to stay wrapped up in bed for another hour or two.

There were no other students at the ortho trauma meeting at 7.30am this morning except for the three who were on-call last night, in particular, neither of the other two guys on my team, so it was just me and my ortho reg for the morning. And what a morning it turned out to be. An old, frail lady was admitted late last night with a truly ugly periprosthetic hip fracture; unfortunately she was most definitely not fit for surgery. And by 10am I had done an ABG (I still hold they're much easier than IV lines, for sure!), witnessed a DNR discussion, performed a supervised femoral nerve block (step two of see one-do one-teach one), and assisted (on the ward!) in the insertion of a Steinmann pin through the proximal tibial bone -- old-school orthopaedics.

It was a pretty intense morning, not just the medicine part of it all, but some of the emotional stuff because this absolutely precious lady really isn't doing too well right now... So it may sound counterintuitive when I say it was a good day, but I guess what I mean by it is that it was one of those days that felt like Real Medicine; it was one of those days that made me truly excited to become a doctor in a year and a half's time; it was one of those days that reminded me what a privilege it is to be learning what I'm learning, doing what I'm doing every day of the year.

Real Medicine.

Today was a good day. Long, but good.