Nicella Nedole Strikes out in Obstetrics...Part 1

So apparently Nicella Nedole showed up for my first day of OB at St. Joes and boy was she on a roll...as soon as she got to post-partum at 4:frrrreakin45 am, she wandered around looking useless and scared and possibly a little bit terrified and when she went up to the nurses' station, Nicella promptly dropped everything she was holding all over the huk's desk right as she was going to introduce herself..."uh, hi esteemed nurses...never fear, your lowly clumsy lame new intern is here!". I then spent about 30 minutes trying to figure out how to read through the charts at Joes, and how to log onto the freakin computer... and I then realized that yes, there are 59 post-partum patients right now, and yes, me and the other intern needed to write notes on all of them before 7am rounds...crapper... Luckily, there were three 3rd year med students there who could write notes, and the PGY3 OB resident has to cosign all of their notes...so I think sometime during this rotation I'm going to try to con them all into thinking that they are so smart that maybe they should just try to write all 59 notes to impress the seniors, and then I wouldn't have to write any! Anyhoo...we then went to 7am rounds, which by the way are NOT postpartum rounds...they are high risk OB rounds where the 3rd and 4th yr residents present their patients while all the rest of us lowly clumsy idiot newbies take a little much needed snooze in the back of the room. We then all split up and went to our assigned stations. You have three options: OB triage, "Deck" (which is L&D, where they had, count em, 18 patients in active labor this morning!), or DORM clinic (dept of repro medicine- ie, the OB continuity clinic at Joes)...thank goodness I was sent to DORM on my first day. I saw a bunch of OB prenatal visits, postpartum pts, and did a few well woman exams. It was a really good experience....that is, until Nicella rearer her ugly head again. I went in to see this Spanish speaking only lady (which is 99.999999% of the patients at DORM), proceeded to butcher her native tongue, dropped my pen on the ground about 500 times and while picking it up one of those times, had it explode on my hand, turning my thumb a lovely permanent shade of indigo. I then dropped the U/S gel which splattered everywhere a few minutes later into the visit, and then finally let the lady go home after doing cultures and starting abx (who was 22 weeks with slight abd pain and "bloody vag d/c about 2 months ago" and just now decided to get that checked out...brilliant)...AFTER the patient was long gone, I realized her first U/S prelim results were back and that I had missed a pic they printed out with her info on it paper clipped to the back of the chart...as I read down the scan, I saw a little word that pretty much made me go into cardiac arrest...it said "ectopic". I then went back in forth in my head about a billion times whether I should drop the chart and run for my life and start a career in apple fritter baking or something...but then I sucked it up and went to the attending and told her I think I made a big booboo and showed her the U/S and asked if that meant that the lady had an ectopic at 22 wks (all the while picturing this baby floating around in this lady's abdomen, swinging from her transverse colon). The attending gave this little laugh that basically implied "Nicella...you poor retarded little intern" and told me that all those printouts say ectopic on them, but it doesn't mean the pt has one unless they have information written after that nasty little word. I turned about as red as I do during Dr. L's porno presentations at Baptist, and then decided that I'm going to sue the U/S company for giving poor interns heart attacks by writing out random "ectopics" on their patient's U/S.

On that note, hope you are all surviving. I'm on call on Sunday, meaning I'm covering deck, triage and postpartum with only one senior there with me...I'm sure I'll have quit this whole doctor stuff for sure by 8 am Sunday morning...