Back Home Again, In Indiana

For several reasons I am very happy to be back home again after being gone for a month on rotation. I absolutely hate being away from home. I hate being away from Sarah. I hate being away from my own stuff - my TV, my Computer, my PS3, my own bed, my own shower and bathroom. I hate being away from my own town in an unfamiliar place with no one else I know. I hate sharing one bathroom and small house with three complete strangers, even though my roommates this past month were all very nice and polite. I just never get into a comfortable routine sleeping in a strange bed and eating from a dirty microwave on paper plates and with plastic silverware. And you should see the shower in this place. It is literally a tub, like one you would see in a movie from the 1930s. It's completely separate from the wall, and has this metal ring around it hanging from the ceiling where the curtain completely surrounds you. When I stand in this shower, the curtain goes up to my shoulders and the water pressure is so weak that the water only hits me from the nipples down unless I hunch over. The shower by far is the worst part of the house. The shower notwithstanding, the house itself really isn't that bad, but the bottom line is it isn't home.

Everything I mentioned above makes living away from home tough enough, but in addition to being away and all of the pressures and anxieties that come along with that, this rotation was one of the most challenging rotations I've had thus far. It was really a great example of what can be great and what can be not so great about being a medical student. Some of the many great features include: (1) a busy service with lots of exposure to patients and many diseases, (2) a friendly hospital and nursing staff, (3) accommodating medical education department, and (4) free food. Now one of the features I could have put into this list was encouragement to be active and learn, but I felt at times that was only partly true and this is where things become wishy-washy. On some days, we were heavily included in what was going on - our superiors would ask us for our impressions and ideas, and would include us in on what was going on. They would even laugh and joke around with us. On other days, however, we would work hard and see people and would basically be completely ignored. They would have educational meetings and not tell us or they would jump up and leave and not even tell us what was going on, even if it involved patients we were working with and we were sitting right next to them. Honestly, not only would I not know what to expect day to day, it was hard to know what type of response I would get hour to hour. I felt like this rotation was like the rapid-cycling bi-polar girlfriend I always wanted but never had (sarcasm).

Another thing that made the rotation tough was that we worked with a lot of different superior physicians. One thing I have learned on my nearly two years of clinical rotations is that there are many ways to skin a cat. Part of being a medical student is being told you are not doing something correctly, and I get that. This especially occurs in the operating room. But I feel like it was multiplied a lot during this rotation simply because we were working with so many people. As an example, when you are told to cut a suture 1 cm in length instead of 0.9 cm in length in one surgery, then you are told to cut a suture 1.3 cm in length instead of 1 cm in length in another surgery, and you deal with instructions and criticisms like this all day, it really starts to wear on you. I think the icing on the cake was when a nurse ripped an electric razor out of my hand and showed me how to use it. Really? Does she really think I can't figure out how to use an electric razor? It almost becomes comical after awhile. These OR examples were actually pretty minor because the OR and nursing staff at this hospital were very nice overall and I enjoyed being in the operating rooms during this rotation. Unfortunately, I can not get into the details of things that happened that really bothered me due to professional reasons.

Part of the problem was that the service was really busy and there were A LOT of students working (which is why I kept saying "we" instead of just referring to myself) and I think sometimes they just didn't have time to help us out or include us. Also, when you work with so many supervising doctors, sometimes you work with people who have much different personalities than you. I am a very laid back person, and I think that sometimes for people who have more aggressive personalities, my attitude is misunderstood as being lazy or lacking knowledge because I don't speak up a lot. And as I said, all of this stuff happens on every rotation at every hospital. But for whatever reason it seemed to be exaggerated this past month. The month wasn't all bad - the strong features of the rotation that I pointed out above were really, really good. Regardless, the fact that I was away from Sarah and my home on top of the worse-than-usual awkwardness that goes along with being a medical student, I can safely say that I am glad to be back home again in Indiana.