WILTIMS #358: Meh... But seriously, don't bend over

Yesterday was rough for all the wrong reasons. Woke up with the telltale prodrome of a head cold. Missed my 4:57 subway train because it briefly didn't exist. Missed my 5:11 subway train because I got a new credit card number three months ago. Had to beg to get on the crosstown bus because my MTA card hadn't yet realized that it now had money on it. Got to the hospital nearly on time and then tore my shoelace in half while changing into scrubs.

Then things really heated up! I spent the next couple hours standing awkwardly behind colleagues who can actually speak spanish and taking notes on what I guessed the patient might have said. Then I got to observe a procedure for the removal a polyp that turned out not to exist. Lunchbreak. Slept through a half hour of computer training. Killed an hour in the student lounge, updating my patient log and confirming that the hurricane forecast to hit us was in fact going to miss our continent. Then I doodled my way through a two hour HIPAA privacy training that was admittedly slightly entertaining. Finally, we all met back up in the labor and delivery conference room for a lesson on abnormal uterine bleeding... but the resident who was going to teach us has to run out to the clinic. About a half hour later we got a text saying we can go home.

I'm not sharing all of this to be a downer (but I'm sick and it's cold and rainy outside, so it did fit my mental state as well as this mug of hot chocolate fits in my hands [slurp]). I just wanted to share one solidly meh day. Sometimes I feel like, by only sharing all the dramatic and interesting things in med school, I am overselling it a bit. A lot of medicine is actually spectacularly boring, even ignoring med school classes like biochemistry or pharmacology. While on the inpatient service in pediatrics, I spent hours writing up notes and only 5-10 minutes a day talking with my patients.

But when it is cool, it's super cool. It just wasn't today. [shrug]

YesterdayIL: Never, ever bend down to place something in the trash in the OR. Doesn't matter if the item is a dripping piece of trash soaked in every possible bodily fluid. Drop it in the vague vicinity of a biohazard trash can. If you miss, then you miss. No biggie.