Back to the Buzzling World of General Medicine

First day at work in general medicine as a SHO....hmm....did not really go very well.

1. There were cattles and horses running wildly along the highway. Although I left my flat 10 mins earlier, I was 20 mins late to work. Not a good impression at all.

2. Arrived at the hospital. Now where should I report? See, I have been contacting the relevant people...but none of them seem to wanna tell me which dept I was meant to report. So I walked from one secretary to another...before finally told that I would be based in respiratory for the next 4 months.

3. Got the short straw. I had to review patients under this particular consultant who was on-call over the weekend. So obviously, he had many more patients spread over the entire hospital... not to mention those that were already in the respiratory ward.

4. To make matters worse, I had to stop my rounds at 11 am to attend an induction. The induction was to give all new doctors about the nature of the job and our rotas. Damn.... an hour flew by just like that....argghh...still have many patients to review.

5. As I am new in these wards, I did not know where to look for the notes. I did not know the patients very well (which made me spend more time reading through their notes...and it was not easy reading the "cakar ayam" doctors' handwriting).

6. Then, I became the bad person because 2 of the patients were apparently fasted since midnight, but was not on the list for their upper GI endoscopy! So they fasted for nothing...and I was blamed...sigh. All I could do was apologised...but they were obviously not happy. After investigating further, I soon found out that no referral was made by the doctors before me... sigh. How irresponsible!

My legs were like jelly, my lips were cracking, my head was pounding due to dehydration, my stomach was rumbling, my urine was so concentrated... You know, sometimes I wonder, why we are al so concerned about a patient's urine output, when my own output was <10ml/hour as well? This is the reality of medicine I suppose. We work hard to ensure patients are well, but we tend to forget that we are also human, and could potentially become a patient if we don't look after ourselves. And sometimes, patients think we are bionic human...