The TV Version of My Life

I just came back this morning from my first ER shift, which was overnight.  Things went pretty decently overall, and I finally was able to see how an acute CVA is managed from when the patient comes in the door to when the patient is finally admitted, which was nice.  However, my brain is fried from very intermittent sleep, and so I will present a totally brainless yet totally worthwhile collection of...

THE BEST EVER MOMENTS FROM SCRUBS!!!

For those of you not familiar, Scrubs was a TV comedy which ended a year or two ago.  It was very lighthearted and absurdist, yet probably had the most accurate portrayal of medicine on television.  (At least compared to the more melodramatic stuff like Grey's Anatomy, House or ER.)  So, here is the top 5, and please note (of course) that I do not own any of these videos, and I am not distributing them for profit:

5) The Pediatrician: This scene is where Dr. Cox and Jordan are looking for a pediatrician for their newborn son, and Dr. Cox (a Dr. House-like figure) meets his match.  I love this because it is both hilarious and accurate in depicting how some attendings can cut through the crap like nobody's business.

4) Things I Could Care Less About: This particular clip is more about Dr. Cox not caring that it is JD's last day of residency, but it always reminds me of the fact that, on surgical rounds, there are things your seniors care about hearing and things they don't.  Woe betide you if you mix the two up!

3) Exploratory Surgery: Self-explanatory awesomeness.

2) Medical Gangs: This is JD's daydream of the rivalry between medicine residents and surgical residents, and how he and his best friend Turk reconcile it.

1) How To Become A Surgical Attending: If only knocking out the competition for surgical residency was this awesome.  Bonus points for The Todd and his Betrayal Five.

A Subject Close To My Heart

I don't want to beat anybody over the head in either direction. But the NY Times has a terrific article coming up this weekend on abortion provision in our country, and how shifts in medical education and training for ob-gyn residency has changed our attitudes and ability to access decent care.

NY Times: The New Abortion Providers

My only point is this: it's legal, and women deserve reasonable access to safe procedures without risk of being hassled (either as abortion providers, nurses or patients). We don't hassle transplant surgeons for giving new livers to recovering alcoholics, and we don't hassle psychiatrists for treating sex offenders. Let doctors learn, train and do their jobs without the politics. We all have a responsibility to treat our patients to the very best of our ability, and that means knowing how abortion procedures work and how to manage the care and complications, even if one doesn't plan on providing them in practice. If you don't want people in your community to terminate their unwanted pregnancies, let's all work together on ways to prevent them from happening in the first place.

Not So Much a Throwdown as a Slowdown

A corollary to go with my bad-luck-turns-into-good-luck theme is that things are almost never what I expect. I've been sweating and dreaming (nightmare-ing, really) and just worrying myself into a hole about the start of residency for weeks now. I've been dreading the responsibility and feeling excited for the importance of it all, and just generally expecting that it was going to be a big huge change.

Predictably, it is boring and easy and anti-climactic.

I've been assigned to start on gynecology, and I had no complaints about that because I really do love the field. This particular hospital doesn't have any obstetrics, unfortunately, but I still enjoy things like clinic care and hysterectomies and such, so I really didn't change my expectations going in. The attending is super nice and a great teacher, and it is really a pleasure to be around attendings who let you do things but don't pressure you if you're not sure which way to go when you're starting out.

But my god, the boredom. It turns out they only have 2 half-days of clinic a week, and nobody scheduled cases because they didn't want patients post-op over the holiday weekend. And the following week, even clinic is cancelled. So basically, my job is to wait for consults, and I have not had that many so far. (I did have one very young teenager miscarry her pregnancy, and then go 10 rounds with me on starting a reliable birth control method while showing no indication that she would change her 3-partners-in-2-months pattern, but that's ureters under the ovarian arteries. Ha! Water under the bridge! Gyn humor! HA HA!!!)

I've been so relaxed on this rotation, people keep coming up to me and saying that I look too happy to be an intern. The program director for surgery keeps asking me why I'm wearing an actual skirt instead of wrinkled scrubs. My co-intern teased me about the audacity of wearing dusty pink peektoe heels. And everyone keeps checking their schedule to see when they get to go on gyn.

In other news, my parents are leaving relatively soon for a massive trip to Asia which will include attending my sister's MBA graduation and hanging with my expat cousins in Shanghai. Needless to say, I am super jealous and wish badly that I could go, but I'm also having an odd feeling of dread. They'll be gone for quite awhile, and I can already tell that I'm going to really miss having them to call and complain to and get scolded by. Which always surprises me, because I am the average Indian twenty-something-treated-like-she's-16 and every time I come home I get scolded and nagged for this and that, and I hate it. HAAATE it. But I know that when they go, they're going to have such a good time that they'll do what they usually do, which is out of sight, out of mind, and not worry about me at all. The last time my whole family was on a trip together without me, my mom kept hanging up on me because she had parties to get back to. Parties. The time before that, my parents went on a cruise with my British aunt and uncle in the Caribbean. I was studying for finals during winter quarter in college, and feeling stressed and depressed and lonely. I got a call from them while studying on my birthday, and they sounded too relaxed and semi-boozed to talk me off the ledge (mind, it takes like 1 rum drink to do that to my mom).

So I will be free, soon, and irritatingly, I'm not looking forward to it. It's going to be very lonesome.