“Take one more look. Surgery will prep the neck in the meantime.”
Emergency medicine is a cruel field. The more I learn, the more I realize my deficiencies, my weaknesses, my fears. As I uncover the intricacies and nuances of this specialty, questions continue to arise. The scope of practice is ever growing and self-doubt seems to only grow with experience.
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“What’s your airway plan, Michelle?”
To be quite frank, I don’t think I actually listened to what my junior said in response. Without much thought, I promptly replied (in my big boy voice), “Awesome, I’m going to help you set up.”
Since July, I’ve been told that I’m a “senior resident.” I’ve also been told (by Uncle Ben),
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For most of this site’s readers, first year of med school is well in the past. You’ve moved on from the monotony of books and PowerPoints to the revelation of actual cases. You see the subtle connections between text and reality, develop pattern recognition, and learn how medicine actually works. If you entered medical school expecting to heal the world,
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Teaching on a clinical shift can sometimes be difficult: it’s busy, everyone’s running around and it’s hard to capture a trainees attention. Recently, on twitter, Amal Mattu (@amalmattu) has been posting pictures of his white board teaching: discrete pearls written down and shared with anyone who walks by. The pearls are often prompted by patients presenting during that shift but they don’t have to be.
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“Code Blue in the waiting room!”
As my co-resident, attending, and I sprinted down the hall, I vividly remember thinking to myself that I probably shouldn’t be here right now. I was working upstairs in the surgical ICU. On a particularly slow overnight, I decided to head down to the ED to visit some friends.
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The Paradox
“Go take a break.” “Let me quickly pick up these two patients.” “Go grab some food and come back.” “I’m fine, I’ll just…” “Sanjay, get the hell out and don’t come back for fifteen minutes.”
It was my sixth overnight in a row. After having struggled for over 15 minutes with trying to place an ultrasound guided IV in a sickle cell patient,
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Teaching on a clinical shift can sometimes be difficult: it’s busy, everyone’s running around and it’s hard to capture a trainees attention. Recently, on twitter, Amal Mattu (@amalmattu) has been posting pictures of his white board teaching: discrete pearls written down and shared with anyone who walks by. The pearls are often prompted by patients presenting during that shift but they don’t have to be.
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The MDCalc Fellows program is a 2-year longitudinal engagement for residents and medical students passionate about EBM and knowledge translation.
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