first month over.

The first month of internship is over. VA wards came and went. Have to say, it wasn't as bad as it could have been. Highlights of the month include having a great resident, co-intern, and med students, capped by a fun day out at The Oregon Brew Fest down by the waterfront (don't ask how we all were able to not be at the hospital, but we had no patients that day anyway). Pretty cool huh. I don't rememebr too much of brew fest just because there were so many different types of beer-- the highlights were probably trying the beer with 0 hops, the espresso beer, the acai berry beer, and pomegranate beer. I'm more of a PBR man myself, but hey, beer is beer. Beer fest was followed by a final 30 hour call which I think was particularly brutal, and everyone just was too tired to think. My resident fell asleep on me presenting a patient (yes, apparently i put people to sleep), and we were all just happy to be over with the month, basically just ran out of the hospital post call...

Pretty much every week in the summer is some kind of festival is going on. There was an international beer festival, then the oregon brew fest, and this weekend is some type of eating festival. Then a bunch of music festivals throughout. This is summer in the NW, so it makes sense everyone is taking advantage of the good weather before, gulp, the rain comes.

As for now, I'm on to Emergency Room at the VA. Pretty standard ER, with acute and non-acute/urgent care patients. Obviously, its not going to be Kings County/Downstate (aka gun shot wounds and motorcycle accidents), but going to a shift work type of schedule will be a good change. I remember really liking ER as a med student, and did an elective with my friend Brady in the ER which was pretty interesting, and ER clerkship with Inna, Tyler, and Tassalo! (the austrian/german visiting student) was also pretty fun. However, when you have to do it as a job and for real, its just not the same. Maybe you just have to really like the people you work with. Not having to do a full workup/problem list is also a nice change, though i'm so used to doing that, that i'm definitely the slowest person there. I think I had a pt in an acute bed for 5-6 hours and didn't do one single intervention (no labs, no xray, etc). Because I had no idea what was going on with him. Finally, he looked minimally dehydrated so he got IV fluids. I think at County I would have been flogged for that. The nurses definitely gave me shit for that, but whatever.