The first day of internship

Today was my first day of internship at Pennsylvania Hospital! There were a few hitches - we didn't have our own long white coats (the universal symbol of being a doctor), so we had to borrow other people's. Not a big deal - we put tape over their names, which are stitched over the pocket. A few of us also didn't have our logins or passwords to one of the main computer programs used in the hospital. Without it, we couldn't enter electronic orders, or really check labs on patients. It took a couple hours to sort it out, so that definitely ate into our working time. Also, I still don't have my email account. Oh well - hopefully nothing crucial was sent to us! All this was a little annoying, because you would think these things would all be taken care of weeks ahead of time, since we found out we were going there in May. But it's not a big deal.

Despite it being the first day, I think it went relatively well! I had 7 patients to start, and 3 of them were discharged. My resident helped me out, as well as the other intern on the team quite a bit since we didn't know these patients at all. We were also lucky - my co-intern (Christina) and I both know the programs and the system relatively well, so we were able to do things much more efficiently (I imagine) than some of the other new interns. Some of the newbies definitely had frazzled looks on their faces. :)

Tomorrow will be much harder for us - we're on call. Christina has to stay until 10pm, and I am staying overnight until the next day at 1pm, and we are taking patients during most of that time. That means not only will we be busy with the patients we already have, but we will also be admitting patients from the ER, which takes on average 1 - 1.5 hours per patient. We can each take up to 5 new patients, in addition to the ones we already have. It's gonna be interesting!