Day in the Life: Surgical Floor

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these! I’m gonna have to change up the format a bit in relation to my previous “Day in the Life‘s” but the overall gist should largely remain the same! They’re being added to my Medical Mondays series though!

This was my very first rotation as an intern/first-year resident!

What’s the difference between an intern and a medical student?

I have actual responsibilities now and people look to me to make medical decisions. It’s terrifying.

Day in the Life: Surgical Floor

5 a.m. – 6:15 a.m.

My hours are techhhhnically from around 5 a.m. – 6 p.m., but if something happens with a patient like it did on the Friday of my first week, I stay til it’s taken care of [7:30 p.m.].

I probably should not have been walking at 4:45 in the morning here, but that’s pretty much what I ended up doing for the entirety of this rotation because I didn’t have a parking deck card. (The office was never open by the time I was free to go there.)

Anyway, this is the time I use to pre-round on patients, get the pager back + get sign-out from the night team to see if there were any new consults or overnight events and to prepare the morning list.

6 a.m. – 7:30 a.m.

We update our seniors on the patients and go round on all of them to see how they’re doing. If there’s time, we grab a quick bite for breakfast (in my case, I extract a jar of overnight oats from my pocket) and go over the plan for our patients before the seniors head off to do their cases for the day.

7:30 a.m. – 12 p.m.

Usually, there’s supposed to be an actual surgical intern on the floor, but the only one they had was on nights, so…I got to act as the stand-in surgical intern. Since they needed someone on the floor to be writing notes, putting in orders, repleting labs, answering pages and taking consults, I didn’t end up going into the OR or to the clinics.

Part of this was also because I had 3 medical students with me. Two of them were doing their sub-I’s (aka planning on going into surgery) and one was a 3rd-year. The sub-I’s were monumentally helpful in orienting me to the hospital and computer system, as well as with notes and putting together the lists and such. I’m not really sure what I would’ve done without them! (I do not remember being this helpful as a med student…)

They were so nice!!!

I was fine with not going in for surgeries since I was wildly spoiled on my surgery rotations and definitely wouldn’t have gotten to be first assist here. Also, the med students needed recommendation letters since they’re applying for residencies, so it was way more useful for them to be in there with the attendings anyway.

12 p.m. – 12:30 p.m.

I’m a little sad that the hospital doesn’t feed me–I only get a meal stipend for when I’m on my Inpatient Family Medicine service, and that’s not until…mid-October, if I’m not mistaken, so I prepped all my meals the week beforehand.

We usually get a little bit of time to eat around noon, and my Isolator Fitness Meal Prep bag carries all my meals/snacks for the day (…as well as my notes, pagers, handbooks, portable chargers, wallet, and pretty much everything else)! :]

It’s a good thing I’m okay with eating the same thing throughout the week. My meals have been as follows:

• Breakfast: overnight oats + fruit
• Lunch: chicken, cauliflower or spinach, pineapple fried rice
• Dinner: smoothies + other leftovers

This was made with frozen strawberries, guava juice, 1/2 a scoop of Bob’s Red Mill vanilla protein powder, + a sprinkle of hemp seeds!

12:30 p.m. – 4:30/5 p.m.

Chasing down labs/orders/imaging results, answering more pages, taking care of consults, seeing consults, repleting labs, playing operator for pages to the night pager, and rounding on patients! The surgery patients are all over the hospital, so in a way, it was super helpful since I kindasorta got to know where everything/everyone was.

Not sure if I’ve ever mentioned how much I hate talking on the phone. (There are a grand total of two people outside of my family that I call.) This rotation has definitely forced me to get over it though. I had to make over 20 phone calls (+ 5

5 p.m. – 6/7 p.m.

If we finish with our patients early, I run to the fishbowl to save a spot so we won’t be last of all the different surgical services to sign out. We update the night team on any things to watch for/follow up on and I give the horcrux pager back to them!

The muffs is usually waiting at the door for me by the time I get home and loves to check out what I’m eating. <3

Exceptions

Wednesday mornings are surgical didactics sessions and are apparently protected time, so I was allowed to take a break from the pager.

One of the doctors here puts together a lecture for his thyroid + parathyroid surgery patients on Tuesday and/or Thursday mornings to explain everything to them, so I got to sit in one of those too!

On Fridays, I’d have morning report with the Family Medicine team and then see patients at our office, followed by our Family Medicine didactics in the afternoon! :] It’s always so nice to see everyone from my team again–it always feels like it’s been so long! (When we randomly bump into each other at the hospital, there are usually happy dances and hugs involved.)

I found a place that sells mango passionfruit smoothies (*-*) on one such Friday and may have stuck around longer than necessary to play Pokemon Go…

• Do you like talking on the phone?
• Do you do any food/meal prep for each week?