Sorry it’s a late post but working 11 to 14 hours days is making me very sleep happy.
Understandably.
As my first week on nursery, me and my cointern got absolutely slammed. As in the nursery was close to full almost all week which is a big deal when you aren’t well versed in all of your responsibilities and the specific EMR. Don’t get me wrong, we weren’t blindsided, we were just not particularly efficient enough to make it easy on ourselves.
From what I can tell at this point, nursery, the well babies, is both routine and unpredictable. Not often unpredictable, but when it is, it’s important to know what to do. Babies are incredibly resilient but very fragile in the same way. Sometimes they just don’t know how to breath. It’s been very interesting to be able to almost learn from the very bottom, the very start of life.
Wednesday and Thursday were probably the worst because we really did drown. I was left alone in the afternoon because my cointern had to go to clinic. And 6 babies were born all at once. Do you know how many babies that is? Like 50 babies. At least that’s what it felt like, alone, at 1:30 in the afternoon when I needed to see the rest of the babies and write entire initial notes. My cointern came back to save me, which I was super relieved about but felt horrible for at the same time. We’re supposed to get to go home after clinic which ends about an hour earlier than sign out happens so I was felt so bad for making him come back and help me but we would have been screwed over the next day if we didn’t. Though we were kind of screwed over anyways, unable to handle the afternoon because of our 4 hour lecture time. It’s protected time, but babies are still born and notes don’t get done. To say we struggled was an understatement.
We mostly had it together by Friday and by Saturday I was on the discharge train, sending babies home left and right. But yes, I’ve been working without a break for two weeks now, with one more week to go. But I digress. I got way better in just a week is the end point. Residency moves super fast.
While I’m enjoying nursery itself more than I would, I do not like being in C-sections. We have to attend each one (and higher risk deliveries, but those I only mildly mind) and just being in an OR with that procedure again…it’s just one of my least favorite places to me. Don’t misunderstand, I don’t hate any of it. My OB rotation in med school was just…a situation and being in there just makes me lose my brain. And I need my brain. I need to be over it, like, yesterday because I have a job to do in there. But if I get called in there 45 seconds before baby comes out again I’m gonna lose it.
So much to learn so quickly.
Medicine With Sass 
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