First week, check

So one week of rotations under my belt, and uhh... not so bad so far. Of course, I'm in psych, which is classically not one of the miserable rotations. I have friends that are already taking overnight call, inserting foley catheters, starting IVs, and getting seriously pimped, so I think I just drew the lucky first rotation.

I've been accounting for this discrepancy in hours by going out damn near every night. Can't tell you how much I'm loving NYC and its perpetual live music, fantastic food, copious well drinks, and festivals.

For psych, I have quite a long commute, since the psych portion for Brooklyn hospital, for us, at least, is at Manhattan Psychiatric Center, which is two subway transfers and a bus ride from where I live in Brooklyn to where it is up off Harlem.

On the other hand, most of what we're doing is "watching". There aren't that many procedures to learn in psych, except on the hypothetical. It all gears around the patient interview and knowing the meds patients are on, but otherwise, what is there for us to do? And the floor I'm on is the most acute psychiatric patient care one, so I can't really help with their work schedule by taking cases since no one's about to let a small inexperienced female medical student into a room by herself with a patient that hasn't been able to get along on the other floors.

It's interesting though. I've seen one patient that is showing remarkable improvement due to some pretty creative prescribing and House-ian thinking on the part of our attending. We have one patient that required five people to hold her down and still managed to tag a nurse pretty badly. Another patient, everyone's favorite, that they had me interview, which involved her ranting at me for about 10 minutes. I'm assured she'll probably cuss me out three or four times in our six week hiatus.

Today, I'm heading out to walk around Prospect Park for a while. Should be a blast.