Though technically a little premature as I am working Sunday. I have to say – mucho love of the whole rotation shindig, especially in the hospital. Let’s have a look back to 6 weeks ago and see how I felt prior to it starting…
Tomorrow begins 6 weeks in the small animal hospital area. Two weeks of anaesthesia, which is according to my friends hellish, and according to my housemate 90% boring. I’m happy as long as I know what my jobs are, and apparently small animal isn’t very good at that, so we’ll see. After those 2 weeks follows 4 weeks of small animal medicine, which is apparently 4 individual weeks of various areas of the hospital. Should be interesting. I might have forgotten what daylight and indeed trees look like by the end of the 6 weeks.
So I wasn’t that aprehensive then. And for the record, Anaesthesia (as you may have gathered from my frequent lyrical waxing) was neither hellish nor boring. It turned out by the way (as I haven’t been keeping you informed) that small animal medicine is actually two weeks of Internal Medicine (i.e. pretty much anything that isn’t emergency, heart and lungs, surgery, neuro or skin – so lots of gut problems, cancer and immune-mediated diseases), a week of ICC days (it’s either ECC [Emergency and Critical Care] or ICU [Intensive Care Unit] – we chose to combine the two names) (days, as a later rotation is ICU nights, ICU being so busy they need it staffed 24 hours. Otherwise it wouldn’t be very intensive care…), and a week of cardiothoracics medicine. And I loved every single minute of it apart from one day in IM when I was a bit stressed with 4 cases at once, and one day in cardio where one of the clinicians pissed me off. I like him now though, so we’re all ok.
I think if you are someone who lives for praise for lateral thinking, doing things well and knowing the answer, rotations are an absolute goldmine. Although still lacking knowledge I adore the reinforcement of my competence. For example, today a nurse briefly told me how to run a paper trace ECG and I thereafter did 3, no worries. I love the “ask, tell, learn, do” aspect. Or being given a huge long list of things to do for a dog today, and thinking “no lunch today then” and then managing to organise, cajole and generally sort it all out so as you not only get lunch you get a long lunch and coinscidentally turn up back at work just as the next procedure is starting.
One sad aspect is that I’ve enjoyed it so much but I only have 6 weeks to do in the hospital (around Christmas) and I bet they won’t be as nice as they are surgery and neuro as opposed to medical. I like medical. I don’t think I’ll ever be much of a surgeon (although it’s hard to avoid it unless you go into academia). I can do surgery and am proficient – the learn-do aspect is the same so once I’ve done one spay I’ve no problems repeating the performance. However surgery doesn’t interest me. Which is a surprise, as I thought when I first started vetting that I would prefer surgery and dislike all the fluffy silly medical stuff. Odd.
And I’ve just discovered I can post private messages here, which means I can record for posterity the things I want to record but that I can’t discuss here! Not that I don’t adore and trust you all, my lovelies, but there are some things a girl should keep to herself. 😉
Oh and I’m going to learn all of the major European languages. My quest for the year. After all, I work in an industry where Brits are almost a minority. First I plan to learn Spanish as I have a lot of Spanish music. I’ll then follow it with German, Italian and French (learnt that at school – need to learn it properly) . After that – who knows! Portuguese? Russian? The world is the mollusc of my choice!
