A day of extremes

I'm on general surgery right now. It's 4 weeks long and usually thought of as the hardest month of clerkship. I've been having a hard time with my residents who are very anxious to learn everything about surgery, which is great, but it often gets in the way of my own learning. like a fool, I cried and told my senior that he was ruining clerkship for me. I was on call that night and had a brilliant experience.

Unfortunately, the family med program here isn't very popular so there are lots of spots open in the second round of CaRMS. This leaves lots of rooms for students who had their medical training outside of Canada. Many of these are Canadians trained abroad.

These residents have less training in the way our hospitals work making it incredibly difficult for them to stay on top of clinical skills as well as what is happening. They end up being difficult to learn from. Clerks on their off rotation services often end up picking up the slack.

Back to my call night.

I was on with a family resident who is lovely but has difficulty with keeping on top of incoming patients. I ended up spending quite a bit of time doing her job. As one of my seniors said, I was playing the part of the junior that night. From having no responsibility to lots. Awesome!

I've really liked my pediatric experience so I get as many of those consults as I can. This night there were 2 in a row, both were ?appendicitis. Both had LRQ pain x24 hrs, nausea, felt generally crummy. The physical exams I did were identical. Positive psoas, obturator, and McBurneys sign. I figured both were appies.

Then my senior came downand asked the female 2 questions I'd missed. Has this happened before? Tell me about you periods. That pt had an ovarian cyst, the other appendicitis. What a great learning experience!!!

Then the senior taught while walking to the next task.

As long as I get to keep learning, I'm going to keep loving clerkship.