Welcome to Shmeens

I was going to start this post by saying how awesome it was being home post-call for the snowstorm, but as it turns out, it won't get started until I'm already asleep.  Not that this should matter at all, but I'm all holed up in my jammies with my Belgian cocoa dusted truffles and glass of milk and bucket of korean wings and kimchi (awesome combination, I know) and dammit, I want me some snow.  I continually have great things to say about my house and neighborhood, and the latest in that list is that I live one block from an old subway rail line, which in this area runs above ground and transports freight only twice a day.  So I have a ready-made garage under which to park my car, and my neighbors and I will all be able to pull out in the morning without having to additionally dig out the car.  Hooray!!  No damaging the car paint with my shovel this time =P

I woke up yesterday morning to a sweet text from my chief resident, wishing me luck on the upcoming Shmeens rotation.  I feel that I have a lot to prove these two weeks, as I am the only intern from my program being sent here, and I want to make a good impression.  Fortunately, all of the other interns I rotate with seem both capable and nice, and I even ran into a med school friend's boyfriend, who I had forgotten was doing his traditional rotating internship year at Shmeens before starting anesthesia next year.  I really expected the service to be rough and rigid, like a bigger boot camp than my home base hospital, but instead it turned out to be oddly casual.  There were no lunchtime or evening rounds, since the OR was so busy that it simply wasn't practical.  There was minimal pimping, and I didn't get yelled at for the many simple mistakes I made (most of which came from being so disoriented in the hospital, since I had never been there before).  I kept asking the interns when the other shoe was going to drop, and getting blank stares in reaction.

The hospital reminds me a lot of my home base, in that it is neither wealthy nor prestigious, but it is bigger and attracts a reasonable number of patients.   I couldn't believe that in one day, they had two appendectomies, one strangulated hernia (into which a third appendicitis seemed to have perforated and caused abscess formation), one EVAR for AAA repair, two sub-total thyroidectomies, and a million other routine cases.  I'm really looking forward to my non-call days, when I hope I can scrub on a few of the smaller cases and get some more experience.  In that sense, I'm becoming more and more sad that I'm not spending more time at Shmeens, and I'm getting really excited to come back as a second year resident.

So, for now, it's ominous clouds and Gilmore Girls re-runs for me.  Laugh, but know that I have everything I need in my little hole.