Day in the Life: Allergy/Immunology

One of my closest friends is allergic to almost the entire world, so I figured this would be an interesting rotation, and if I learned anything that could be beneficial to her, I could pass it along!

I’d also read in the evals that he taught billing/coding, which would be monumentally useful to learn because hospitals are being forced to switch from ICD-9 to ICD-10 in two days, and absolutely no one is excited about this other than insurance companies, because it’ll complicate things even more, which means they’ll have to pay for even less.

But if you want to be able to bill/code for a “burn due to water-skis on fire, initial encounter,” you’ll be able to do that with ICD-10, so there’s that. (In case you care, there’s one for being hit by a flying spacecraft too.)

Day in the Life: Allergy/Immunology

I am legit standing in front of the hospital and taking a picture of the house I’m staying in.

A Typical Day

My preceptor is super super conservative, but I tend to steer clear of any and all political topics, so it wasn’t a problem. He also has a really stern voice, but is actually super nice, with a dry sense of humor that I found amusing. He’s an amazing ENT physician who completed a fellowship in Otolaryngic Allergy! On Wednesdays, he works out of another rural clinic, and he does surgeries on Thursday mornings.

…He was also sick for the first week (“One of my patients thought it’d be better to give than receive, so they gave me the crap.”) and had laryngitis, so on my second day there, I walked in to find him performing a nasopharyngoscopy on himself without the use of any numbing spray.

Since he’s a total trooper, he just wore a mask and used me as his translator since he couldn’t talk louder than a whisper. (“This is soon-to-be Dr. Fong. She’s a 4th-year medical student and also my translator today. She’ll be taking over my practice next week.”)

7:30 – 12 p.m.: He does all his patients’ nasopharyngoscopies on Tuesday mornings, so after the first two cases, I got to be pretty good about explaining the process while pointing everything out to his patients. :O

This is my script as I remember it.

12-12:30/1 p.m.: Lunchtime!

1-5:30/6 p.m.: He does office visits and sees people for everything from sudden hearing loss and/or dizziness to skin cancers and cerumen (earwax) removal. There’s an audiologist who does hearing tests there and fits people with hearing aids. They also mix their own allergy shots for their patients!

For whenever he had to stick his finger into anyone’s mouth: “This is my finger, and I want it back.”

My school screwed me over on one of my audition rotations/interviews because they didn’t turn in their part of the agreement in time (for the record, I gave them a half-year heads-up). …I’m actually still waiting to hear back from them, but definitely not holding my breath.

Thankfully, my preceptor agreed to keep me around for another 2 weeks, so hooray for not having to waste vacation time for something that was completely not my fault!

Meals

I was given one free meal at the cafeteria ($5 limit) per day, which was a definite plus because I used my credit card to pay the remainder of my tuition this semester, and thus hit my credit limit (joy oh joy), so I couldn’t spend any money.

To counteract this, I put myself on the Homeless Hospital Starvation Diet. I’ve done something like this before for over a month, so it was easy-peasy!

Not gonna lie though–I was reallyy missing the food I’d had in Columbus the weekend before I started this rotation!

Homeless Hospital Starvation Diet is super misleading because I didn’t end up being homeless after all, and I really wasn’t starving either. I just used the two weeks as a chance to eat all the food in my car with the few perishables I had brought along with me (e.g. this 5-Ingredient Breakfast Acai Bowl!).

Parking

Aside from leaving on the weekend to go back to Please Save A Cat to pick up some of my cold-weather clothing, food, and monies, I did not move my car for the entirety of this rotation. It sat in its spot outside the student house and I walked across my backyard every morning to get to the hospital. :P

Housing

At one point, I mentioned my potential homeless-ness for a week, but it got resolved and I got to stay at the student housing for the entirety of my rotation (yay!). It was kinda old and creaky, and that evening, my housemate and I heard several men standing outside our door knocking/ringing the doorbell/trying the door.

We thought it was our shady neighbors, so we didn’t open the door because we had no weaponry to speak of, and didn’t really feel like being murdered.

As it turns out, they had actually been sent there by my preceptor, who was trying to find out my phone number so he could tell me that he’d told me the wrong time to meet for the next morning. Oops. :O