Day in the Life: Inpatient Family Medicine Service

Happy Monday + welcome to another Medical Mondays and my fourth “Day in the Life” for residency–this time on Inpatient Service!

I was the last of the interns to start inpatient service and my last call day was all the way back in early August. The last time I’d even roamed the floors of our hospital was back in mid-July, so to say that I felt lost and confused when I started hospital service would be a wild understatement.

Day in the Life: Inpatient Family Medicine Service

I got to escape for one afternoon to go to a professionalism conference with my fellow co-interns! :]!

7am – 7* pm

We started each morning off with the night resident and our attending to get sign-out on our patients to see what happened overnight, if we got any new admissions, or if there was anything we needed to look out for (e.g. labs, imaging, consults, social work, etc.).

*Although our shifts were technically 12 hours, 6 days a week, the 7pm end-time for our shift is really just a suggestion, because if you’re not done with your work…you’re basically not leaving, unless you finish all the things that require immediate attention…but then comes the world of discharge summaries and paperwork that follow, so you might as well stay til that’s done so it doesn’t hang over your head. That and I like to avoid getting on the weekly “shame” email for unfinished charting. :P

We got new mattresses for the call rooms!!! *-*

After we got sign-out in the morning, we’d go round on our patients, put in orders, call and/or play phone tag with consults, check lab and imaging results, talk with the nurses about overnight events, replete labs, figure out a plan of action for the day in regards to our patients.

Depending on how many patients we had and our attending’s rounding style, rounding would generally start at 8-8:30 a.m. and end anywhere between 10 a.m. – 2 p.m. We’d spend the afternoon following up on labs/imaging/consults, working on admissions, and updating the sign-out sheets. Please don’t ask me what the difference between internal medicine inpatient + family medicine inpatient is, because I still don’t know. ._.

Inpatient medicine has instilled me with a very deep-seated hatred for pagers. It goes off throughout the day for anything from wrong numbers to admissions from the emergency room, and on weekends, holidays, or after 5 p.m., I also took care of the answering service (any calls that went to the office). My current record is 17 pages within an hour. :| donotwant.

I managed to escape after work one evening to run off to Barcade in Jersey City for a family med/internal med get-together! (Free food + games = always a mood-booster.)

The rotation has been pretty draining. I’ve been on the “inpatient diet,” which really just means that I rarely eat throughout the day (not by choice–it just gets super busy). I’ve actually been getting ~10k steps/day in because the hospital’s so big and because i walk to and from work; I’m also learning the system (slowly but surely) and don’t get too lost in the hospital anymore, so I consider this a win.

This week is my last week on service for the calendar year (score!) and I’ve been working with one of our chief residents. I worked with him during my OB rotation too, and he says I work the fastest out of any intern he’s ever seen(?!). Tis a wondrously high compliment and I was super flattered, but there is still a world of knowledge I need to pack into my brain. ._. I hope this means I’ll survive my upcoming 3.5 months of inpatient rotations though?! I guess all those years of self-imposed forced time management and multitasking skills came into handy!

A photo posted by Farrah @ Fairyburger (@fairyburger) on Nov 20, 2016 at 6:00am PST

This is how the muffin greets me when I come home and crash in my apartment. :O

A photo posted by Farrah @ Fairyburger (@fairyburger) on Nov 19, 2016 at 7:45am PST

• Do you watch any medical TV shows? They’re all very medically inaccurate, but Scrubs comes the closest to illustrating the life of an intern!
• Longest work week you’ve ever had? I think I’ve been hovering in the 73-78 hour range, so this is a nice sort of test run for whether or not I’ll live through my winter rotations. I honestly can’t really complain because my friend on surgery has it infinitely worse than I do.
• Can you tell that I’m not the biggest fan of inpatient medicine? :P