As I mentioned in my previous post, I've split my OB/GYN day-in-the-life into two parts to correspond with the two "halves" of my clerkship - 3 weeks on obstetrics [aka, labor & delivery] and 3 weeks on gynecology [gynecologic surgery, gynecologic oncology, and outpatient clinic]. This day happens to come from my week on GYN surgery, as that's when I happened to think about recording my goings-on, but it's a pretty good representation of both surgery weeks as the schedules and structure of my day were all pretty similar.
5 am - Alarm goes off. I hit snooze for another 10 minutes because it's FIVE FREAKING AM and I am not a perfect human.
5:10 am - All right, time to actually make myself get out of bed. I brush my teeth and don a clean pair of scrubs, and settle in at my laptop to do things like check email to see if anything useful rolled in overnight. At the last minute, I make myself a quick Poptart to eat as I'm in the car, as I'm not a huge breakfast eater this early in the morning.
5:48 am - Headed out to the hospital. Still appreciating the fact that it takes maybe 5 minutes to get there on a bad morning. I have to park in the student lot the next block over and either walk to the hospital or ride the shuttle, depending on whether or not I've just missed the shuttle as I'm pulling up [which happens most mornings, let's be real here]. It's a short walk, thankfully, but this is Mobile and at 6 am it's already too hot to be comfortable spending much time outside.
6:00 am - I'm on the floor checking on our two post-op patients who had big enough procedures to stay at the hospital for a couple days. As a medical student, it's technically within my realm of capability to print off the patient list in the morning, write down 24-hour vitals and lab results for the residents, and see patients on my own and write a student note in their charts. Of course, I'm also on rotation at the beginning of the year, and the new interns haven't quite adapted to incorporating students into the team workflow, so instead I wait at the nurses' station and read the H&Ps and past notes in the chart because I can't beat the interns there in the morning to actually contribute some work.
Which then turns into more waiting around talking to my classmates, as the interns take their turns writing updated notes in the charts and the upper level residents slowly arrive and get filled in on everyone's status.
7:00 am - The whole team [me, the fourth year AI, the two interns, and the two upper levels] head down to OR to drop off our stuff in the surgery lounge and check on our cases for the morning. The interns go pre-op the first patient, and the fourth year and I kind of just hang around checking out the board. I take some time to read a bit about the procedures scheduled for the day on my phone [this atlas is a really good resource for GYN surgeries].
7:46 am - Our first case is technically scheduled for 7:30, which of course means that we don't actually roll the patient back to the OR until quite a bit later. In the meantime, the residents are on the computers in the surgery lounge, checking on labs and other patients and what have you.
7:59 am - I run down to the cafeteria to go grab a quick snack while we're waiting - my breakfast go-to at the hospital is a biscuit, sausage patty, and strawberry jam. Quick, cheap, and decently filling.
8:15 am - Back in the surgery lounge, eating second breakfast and taking advantage of the downtime to work in some studying.
8:30 am - Our first case finally rolls; it's a quick one, and I don't scrub in to assist with anything. Since it's the beginning of the year and we have more people in the OR than would normally happen, my main role is mostly to help out the scrub nurse with moving the patient from bed to bed, cleaning up after the procedure, and tying gowns/etc. for the doctors who actually scrub in. There's a lot of standing around and watching and not really being able to actually see anything, because the area involved in gynecologic surgery is obviously not very observable.
9:20 am - After our first case is wrapped up, we head back up to the floor for rounds. Each intern gives an update on the patient she saw that morning to the attending, and we poke our heads into the patient's room so the attending can check in quickly and answer any questions that may come up. Both patients are hopefully getting discharged today, so the residents also fill out discharge orders while we're on the floor.
9:54 am - Back to the lounge to wait on our second case. I pull out my iPad and answer some uWISE questions to keep myself entertained.
10:30 am - Second case rolls back. It's another decently quick one, and once again I don't get to scrub in. I talk to the anesthesiologist and CRNA for a bit as they work on prepping the patient and then mostly loiter around the back of the room since it's pretty difficult to see anything when we're not doing a laparoscopic case that gets put up on the screens.
11:40 am - I walk to the cafeteria to grab something for lunch before heading over to the boardroom for lecture. We have an attending talking to us today about basic infertility work-ups, as our topic for the week is reproductive endocrinology and infertility.
12:50 pm - I tag along with the GYN team as we basically circumnavigate the hospital. We head to the peds tower to see a patient on our consult service as part of rounds, only to discover that the patient has been taken for imaging so she's not available to talk to for the time being. So, everyone troops back down to the boardroom to hang out as otherwise there's nothing scheduled for the afternoon.
1:07 pm - I'm officially dismissed! Time to head home. Here's me making a face in the hallway in celebration.
1:30 pm - And upon reaching home, I promptly change into regular clothes because duh.
I take some time to relax for a bit, check up on social media, read a few blog posts, and watch an episode or two of Orange is the New Black on Netflix [I've been working on catching up on the last two seasons after falling majorly behind].
Around 4, I start back up with studying. I watch a couple more lectures on Tegrity, as we didn't have actual lecture at lunch today, and read and take notes on a couple of chapters from our textbook. I also do a set of UWorld questions to review some of the material I went over from the past couple of weeks - everything is geared at getting ready for my impending shelf exam.
Around 7, boyfriend comes over to make dinner - I've got him pretty well trained at this point. ;) But really, he just likes the practice, as he hadn't mastered a lot in the way of cooking before we started dating last year. We watch a little bit of Family Feud to relax - like I said previously, it's our current evening routine - before we both have to jump back into doing work.
8:43 pm - I'm working on a short presentation that I'm scheduled to give during didactics tomorrow. My topic is abnormal pap smears, and I'm currently working on putting together a handout to be given to my classmates summing up the most important points.
10:30 pm - Time to take a quick shower and get ready for bed. I read a chapter out of the textbook before turning off the light, knowing that 5 am will be here much sooner than I would like.