Staying in tonight

At long last...

Sooo the stuff they say about the psych rotation is pretty true. I'm actually learning a lot, but it is still pretty much like being on vacation, particularly since it's my first rotation and I just got my loan check.

But where was I. Ummm... whew, awesome parties; awesome clubs; awesome bars; awesome restaurants; awesome sites; awesome free Fridays at MoMA; awesome friends; awesome experiences.

That sounds about right. But you people may actually want to know something about what I've been doing school wise.

I'm getting more comfortable in the psych hospital environment. I'm getting to know the patients on my floor and which ones are pretty benign and which ones it's a good idea to make sure I'm standing behind a nurse if I talk to them. Today, due to the rain and a bit too late of a hookah night, I walked in a few minutes late. My patient says "OOOOOOOOH, you gonna get fired! You late!" She then tells me I should have my hair in a ponytail and tries to sculpt it into one. Then, as I was being let into the morning meeting, she yelled "SHE LATE AGAIN!!!" over my head, to the staff's amusement.

There's a new patient who's apparently King Allah and a kung fu master. He's got crazy eyes. I'm looking forward to that transition.

The nearly catatonic man is actually making demands, claiming he wants to see the doctor because the man talking to him is "just a nurse", and upping his activities. The staff refers to this as "You woke him up; you fix him".

It's cool stuff. Nearly every day, our doctor gives us an assignment to read from the Blueprints Psych book, so we present, and then he gives us about an hour lecture on whatever the topic is. He's not a big fan of personality disorders, so the psychologist borrowed us yesterday as none of us had anything to do, so we got a close on personal contact on all the Cluster A, B, and C disorders, complete with him doing imitations of the patients. I really like the people at this hospital.

Oh, though there's one medical doctor that's after anyone with small obnoxious habits, so naturally I'm patient zero. He's grabbed my wrist once (I was playing with my watch band), my pen once (no bad habits in front of the patients!), and the psychologist's pen twice. Noooo idea.

We have some lectures; some of them are really good and helpful; some less so. They also have grand rounds and case conferences that a ton of people in the hospital attend, so I've been to a bunch of those. I've been up to the treatment mall to watch some of the patients' classes. We learned about some famous people that had gone through the program as well as the profiles of a few of the more... uhh... criminally memorable people in Kirby.

So no complaints! In my non hospital time, I've pretty much been finding a new venue every night, but tonight I needed a night off to catch up on sleep.