Shifting Winds

The last few days have been so different than my first 3 weeks here in Havre.

First of all, I'm living with another fantastic temporary roommate. PA Debbie, my host and savior for this week, is just awesome. She is so friendly! We just make dinner and chat and watch TV in the evenings, or just do our own thing. I feel so comfortable here, and it is so nice to have company. I'll really be a bit sad to be moving back into an apartment by myself for the remainder of my rotation. Plus, I'm really going to miss the little dog (even if it does yap a lot).

Secondly, I've been working with a different internist (Dr. H) this week while my preceptor lets her niece shadow her. (Sidenote: her niece, a 20 year-old pre-med student, has shown up to work in "skinny" jeans every single day. Today she also wore "skater" shoes with those thick, brightly-colored shoelaces - a truly excellent display of professionalism (and poor style...skinny jeans are so last summer)).

Anyway, so Dr. H does things completely differently than my preceptor: instead of me seeing every patient, doing the history and physical, and then presenting the case to him, he has me see only 3-4 patients a day. At most. He picks a patient who is complicated, lets me observe the appointment (or rarely I can start the H&P) or review the chart, and then has me spend about 2 hours studying the disease process/labs/medications involved in the care of that patient, while he sees all of his other regular patients. I thought it was a pretty interesting teaching method at first, until I realized that I was spending 8 hours a day with my head in the books.......which is what I did all last year. Nonetheless, I am now a regular expert on aortic stenosis, nephrolithiasis, inborn errors of bilirubin metabolism (especially Gilbert's syndrome), chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy and treatment-resistant heart failure. Then again, I've only seen about 6 patients in the last 2 days. Not exactly the clinical experience I was hoping for.

Tomorrow morning is business as usual, and in the afternoon, Dr. H is receiving training on using the electronic medical record system that will be initiated next week. I plan on sticking around and learning it at the same time, because quite honestly, my regular preceptor is (more than) a bit technologically-challenged, and things will go much smoother if we've both had some instruction.

This evening I finally got to meet up with the medical student from Seattle who is rotating up here. She's actually really nice and not as shy as she had seemed on the phone. I showed her around town a bit (ie: where the Walmart is) and then we went to dinner at a diner and shared stories of rotations and life in general. She is going to try and come with PA Debbie and I to the fair that is in town tomorrow night (there's a rodeo!!)

Things are looking up.

Jen