Today I started my Medicine rotation.
Now as you will all be well aware, I have about as much love of internal medicine as I do for being locked in a tank full of scorpions while having my eyes poked out with forks.
Ever since I lost 8 weeks of my life to my Medicine rotation during medical school, where I didn’t feel I was actively taught anything, was left with the distinct feeling that my consultant personally disliked me, and was almost failed* (a fact unrelated to the consultant’s dislike of me) I have disliked medicine. Other people find it intellectually fascinating, but I can’t help feel that the interesting academic side of medicine has relatively little relationship to the depressing reality of the clinical work (but that’s probably just my surgeon mentality coming out).
So by and large I have not been looking forward to having to do 10 weeks of medicine as part of my internship, but so far I haven’t found it that bad.
Because the physicians generally don’t work as long hours as the surgeons do (and it’s probably best if you dont ask my opinion of why that may be) , I am finally finding myself with time to do the other things I have been meaning to do now that finance isn’t such a constraint, such as going to the optometrist, getting my car cleaned and serviced, and getting medical and dental checkups (I don’t even want to think about how long it has been since I last went to the dentist for something non-urgent).
I am also discovering something about the world that I had forgotten about. When I leave the hospital in the afternoon there is this big yellow think in the sky. I can’t recall what it is called, but it feels pleasant and warm. I know I must have seen it somewhere before, but I can’t put my finger on where, or how long ago…
*Two of the three patient’s I was asked to examine had conditions I had never seen before, and had not recieved any teaching on during my medical term. In my mind the exam hardly fulfilled the stated assment aim of gauging my understanding of diagnosis and management of common medical conditions. I still assert that the main reason that they passed me in the end was that it would just be too much hassle for them to go through the paperwork to actually fail me. While ultimately my other terms (GP, ED) proved that my diagnostic and management abilities were actually not that bad.