Typical morning: early breakfast, then hauled myself in for morning report. The residents all had some kind of class this morning, so there were fewer people than usual there for report. Additionally, everyone was running late, so for a while it was just me, the attendings, and two interns sitting there twiddling our thumbs. Report took all of 5 minutes because there were very few admissions, and then the intern that was supposed to be giving a presentation didn’t show up and didn’t answer his phone when we called, so we gave up and headed to the ward for rounds. Epic fail.
Dr. Kung wanted to wait for Tiny to get back around 9 before doing rounds, so I spent a few hours working on charts. The class ran long, so Tiny didn’t end up getting back till 9:45, and we didn’t start rounds till about 10:30. Dr. Kung had clinic starting at 12, so we rushed through everything with poor MK trying to keep up. On the upside, the baby with intestinal obstruction had finally gone to surgery the previous day, and had had 5 cm of bowel resected, but seemed to be recovering well. I helped Tiny collect a gastric aspirate on one child, and she agreed to let me do it myself tomorrow morning – yay! For you non-medical folks out there, I will take a moment to explain – children who develop TB are actually much less infectious than adults, even when they have full-blown disease, because they usually can’t produce enough force with their coughing to expel any sputum. Whatever stuff they do manage to get out of their lungs they usually swallow. So to test for TB, we put a tube in their nose down into their stomach (an NG, or nasogastric tube), and collect some of their stomach contents early in the morning, before they’ve eaten. We usually take three samples, so it’s a bit of a drawn out process, even though the actual sample collection only takes about 5 minutes. It doesn’t hurt them, but it’s kind of uncomfortable.
Dr. Kung headed off to clinic, but I elected to finish entering the May charts I still had before joining her. It took me about 2 hours, but I did it. Then I carried the box of June charts that I still had back to the A&E storage room on my way to clinic. It was super heavy, and my arm muscles were quivering when I finally made it to clinic. Dr. Kung offered to let me do another skin test, but I was too shaky, and I had to offer a very embarrassed explanation to the patient and Dr. Kung. The rest of the afternoon was fairly uneventful, and we left a little early.
Julia had a film screening for a big conference that her organization was putting on, so we all just kind of chilled at home because we didn’t want to watch a movie without her. We basically just talked all evening. Somehow the subject of songs and games we used to play as kids came up, and we sang “Miss Susie had a steamboat” and various other things for over an hour. We’re such fun, adventurous people.
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