ICU next week

And woo hoo for I dunno, sicker patients?

MICU/CSCU will mark my last three week stint of Internal Medicine, meaning I'm going to need to make sure that I spend some copious downtime learning everything there is to know about... uhhh... medicine. Pathology, here I come. On the long term patient management contact, there seem to be the "Mean/Stupid; sometimes both" patients and the "Nice so I feel bad sticking needles into them or giving them bad news" patients.

Also the whole teaching hospital thing still feels ridiculously strange every time there's a patient with an interesting disease or pathogonomic symptom and then we all wait in line to interview/prod that person. On the one hand, doctors need to learn and having the first case of MS we see either lucked into by drawing the patient or actually being responsible for an MS patient AS a doctor would be bad. On the other hand, it's kind of like a carnival side show for the unfortunate. "Hey, those intermittent neurological symptoms that your husband thinks you're making up sure must suck. Mind if I smack you with a reflex hammer for the sixth time?"

Some of them are pretty cool though. We saw a case of Stevens-Johnson Syndrome, aka "holy crap, those antibiotics made my skin fall off" and the patient who was pretty much letting us do whatever we wanted in the interest of learning. That one fell under the "Nice so I feel bad sticking needles into them or giving them bad news" category. Wasn't my patient though, so I didn't have to do either.

I'm looking forward to ICU. OB/Gyn will be my next rotation, which I've actually heard is very cool despite my general dislike of humans under the age of 2. Not considering it as a specialty or anything, but hey... I get to wear scrubs.

In other news, NYC had about a 2-3 week period of "Wow, what beautiful weather and such a nice change from the unrelenting heat" right into "HOLY HELL, it's cold outside!". I expected a little longer of "long sleeved shirts" rather than hopping right into gloves, two pairs of socks, a sweater, a jacket, and a hat. But that should mean the ice skating rinks open earlier.

Oh, happy early Diwali to my Hindu associates.