Day in the Life: Family Medicine (Audition)

If you happen to be reading this anytime today (10/26) between 8 a.m.-4 p.m.-ish, please send some good thoughts my way! I’m taking the other part of my boards licensing exam, and would definitely appreciate it! :]

So while I’m slaving over that exam, I figured I’d share with you what I’ve been up to for the past 2 weeks–I finished another audition rotation in Pennsylvania and am flying to North Carolina after today!

Warning: This is a crazy long post because I’m fitting a summary of the past 2 weeks into one post. So much for “a day” in the life…

Day in the Life: Family Medicine (Audition)

A Typical Day

Since I was only doing two weeks here, the program set up my rotation so I’d get to spend a couple days in each discipline. I spent 2.5 days in the outpatient clinic in town, 1.5 days in labor & delivery, 1 day at the women’s health clinic for prenatal care, 2 days on inpatient service, 1 day at the rural clinic ~20 minutes away, and 1 day for my interview. :]!

I was given a laptop + pager for the duration of my rotation. :O My pager thought it was January 7, 2003, and went off three times for no apparent reason, but…yay?

Outpatient FM Clinic

• My days were typically from 8-5, with a break in between for lunch. I worked with one of the PA’s, residents, and/or attendings and would see patients, take histories, perform physical exams, and come up with a differential diagnosis + plan/treatment.

L&D

• I always feel a little soulless when I say this, but if you’ve been here since May, you probably know that babies (especially childbirth) really aren’t my thing. Hours were usually ~7 – 5-6:30 p.m. Apparently, babies can sense this, so they never seem to get born while I’m around. I rounded on patients with my friend (she’s an intern here) and we performed newborn exams, checked in on the mothers, and explained the risks/benefits of circumcisions. I was on sugar duty to distract the babies during said circumcisions, and also got to stand in on a lactation consult, which (if I remember everything I heard) will be super helpful for if I’m ever taking care of a new mother!

Inpatient Service

• I haven’t had too much experience with inpatient medicine (which is usually fine by me because I prefer outpatient, butttt…you also learn a lot on inpatient, so it’s good for me). Morning report was at 7 and we’d round on our patients + write up our notes in the morning, attend lunch lectures at noon, + check in on our patients again with our attending in the afternoon. When there was low patient volume, our attending asked us to pick a topic to go over (they’d gone over electrolytes + shock earlier in the week, so we chose anemia), and gave us a mini-lecture/breakdown on how to approach it.

Women’s Health

• This was actually one of my favorite days, probably because I got the most autonomy here. They’d send me into the room by myself (except for the pap smears, which were chaperoned) and I got to do everything–from taking the history, doing domestic violence screenings, to measuring the fundal height, and listening for heart sounds with the fetal doppler. The patients were super chill about me stabbing their arm with a needle (flu shots) even though I’d never done it before.

Rural Clinic

• This clinic was about 20 minutes away, and worlds apart from the other outpatient clinic–the patients here didn’t have 3432937 medical illnesses to manage and most of them were very pleasant, compliant and actually listened to our suggestions(!). It was definitely a lot more peaceful here!

Meals

Although meals weren’t provided, I had my trusty rice cooker with me, and the house I was living in did have a kitchen, so I tried to use up all the stuffs I had hanging out in my car.

This was a result of a deconstructed veggie wrap left over from the resident conference, with brown rice, walnuts, cranberries + avocado thrown in!

There were free meals with journal club + resident conferences, and the cafeteria’s prices were actually really reasonable! (I only bought food once because I’m trying not to spend any money this year.)

I was also treated to dinner by the program the evening before my interview! The food was amazing–we shared the Asparagus & Goat Cheese bruchetta + Southern Fried Green Tomato Caprese, and I also had an Ahi Tuna Wrap, plus Pumpkin Cheesecake for dessert. :] (Sadly, I haven’t been taking pictures of my meal during the residency interview dinners, lest I get judged, hahaha.)

The company was awesome–this residency really likes students from my school, so I already knew two of the residents before coming here! They came to dinner with me, and the other resident went to the same undergrad as me! (Tis such a small world!)

Parking

Free! I lived close enough to the hospital and the clinic to walk, so I did that almost every day (especially because my car frosted over one day), except for the day I was at the rural clinic.

I found this in a bathroom and thought it was hilarious.

Housing

Student housing was provided for free (yay!). There were unfortunately no blankets here, but thankfully, I semi-live out of my car. (I could probably survive for at least a week–much more if I had access to a power source–in just my car.

I got there after dark and there were no signs of life in the house. I had no idea someone else was living there…and this van was parked outside.

It looked a lot more threatening at night.

So I deadbolted the door.

I’ve graduated the status of the guy I was living with to completely-awesome because…despite my accidentally almost locking him out of the house, he:

1. Gave me his avocados
2. Offered me some pro-tips since he’s already been here for a couple weeks
3. Took it for the team and ventured into the creepy basement to test out the washer/dryer.

WHAT A KIND AND AWESOME SOUL.

In all fairness, I’ve also been offering my thoughts on rotations, interviews, residency programs, and general life-advice sorts of things. He left for the weekend and I had an extremely lazy/unproductive weekend filled with Netflix marathons interspersed with trying to study for boards. (I say “trying” because there’s only so much time you can spend having imaginary conversations with yourself until you start to feel a little crazy.)

On Saturday afternoon, I went downstairs (finally) and noticed that it was about 10 degrees colder…which led me to discover that the front door was wide open. (I have no idea how long it was open for–hours? All night?!) …So I grabbed a ginormous frying pan (my taser is unfortunately not with me) to search the house, including the creepy basement. Thankfully, I didn’t find anyone camped out here, hence, why I’m still alive to tell the tale!

• I’m headed to North Carolina next! Got any suggestions on what to visit around Charlotte and Asheville? Let me know in the comments!