Medicine – Week 2

Wednesday

I never thought this day would come. I’ve been trying to keep myself busy with work and working out but I was desperate for Wednesday to roll around. We headed up to the ward and were joined by two new fourth years (even though I keep calling them third years because they are the year above but we are still second years). It was nice to meet people I haven’t actually seen in second year yet and we were all strictly told to prepare the notes. Cue the next four hours of panic trying to make sure the notes were prepped ready for the next patient whilst simultaneously trying to figure out how to write in these notes.

It was tough but I really enjoyed it, I felt a solid part of the team and I know this is what we will be doing as final years and F1’s. It was also good to get to know the layout of patient notes and the clinical system which I prefer a mile over the system over in UHCW. I also was having frantic calls to IT as my login still hadn’t been approved.

It was also good as we were seeing the patients we had written the notes up for ourselves so we could follow the plan through and it also lead to us being able to grab jobs as they came. I ended up getting two bloods done and one other attempt but they were really hard to bleed and were not very well so we decided to leave it because we didn’t want to cause them any more distress. I’ve sent this ticket off to be signed off as a Mini-Cex ( I want to get my sign off’s done ASAP) so I am hoping the reg will be nice. I am stressing a bit in this area as we don’t have anyone on our ward who is ST3+ which are required for our sign off’s so I am hoping that by grabbing any opportunity we can, our tickets will be completed.

In the afternoon we were booked into our lecturers Chronic Fatigue Syndrome clinic. It was a syndrome I was interested in as I had completed that part of the presentation list the evening before. We had also heard our lecturers clinics were good for learning and getting our skills scrutinised so we signed up and were not disappointed. We were given coffee (bonus) and had to ask two questions with every patient and tell our lecturer a fact from this textbook after every patient. The more I learnt about CFS the more intrigued I became. There’s no direct link, no direct cause and no population is specifically presents in apart from it is generally after a viral infection.

One thing I am eager to find out is how Covid-19 will affect the refferals to these clinics as many survivors of Covid-19 have reported unusual tiredness months after the initial infection.

It was a good afternoon and we left clinic debating about this syndrome.

Thursday

Im going to admit it now, this was a slow and quiet day. The consultant only appeared for the board round so the team were having to do the ward round themselves. We found it harder to know what to do and so took ourselves off for our own studies. I took a history (as the last history I took was in March) and we both had a go at listening for tricuspid regurgitation on a lovely patient but I could not hear anything. Looks like I am going to have to go over cardiac examination again.

We also attempted a blood but this again, didn’t go so well. We knew the MDT meeting was coming up so we took ourselves away as we didn’t want to get in the way of an already stressed team. The MDT was good again and I noticed a slight improvement in my scan reading skills to the last week. However, we didn’t manage to get into any clinics so we managed to go and see a dexta scan. This is an x-ray to test for osteoporosis but after the first one, you’ve seen them all.

We ended finishing up early at 3pm. You have good days and quiet days here, I like that though. I got a history done and that’s more than I could do in a week on speciality block.

A Note.

These blog will be different to what I was doing before, but that’s because our degree is different to what it was before. We will probably be different to the cohorts that have come before us and these Covid-19 changes will follow us throughout our careers. It’s OK though, it’s about learning to see the benefits of these changes and tackling the challenges head on. So, I don’t know what will happen in the future of this blog, but luckily for you guys it will be shorter posts and less moaning of how tired I am !