1st day of clinics!

It was not that bad!

First of all, as I mentioned, I'm starting with 2 weeks of Cardiology, which is known for being a relatively light rotation. So that's good. I still had to be there at 7 AM in case we had transfers from ES, since I'm the on-call student for the day (and actually, there's still a small chance I could get called in sometime this evening if anything else comes in!), but in the grand scheme of things 7 AM really isn't that bad -- it's a heck of a lot better than the 4 AM starts I'll have on rotations like Medicine and Surgery! And then it turned out ES was almost empty, and none of the cases were heart-related, so then I had 2 hours to just hang out until the rest of the team arrived at 9. I used the time to brush up on my cardiovascular drugs, and run some errands on-campus (dropping off a take-home exam, getting my mail, and picking up my clinical skills booklet [there's a list of clinical skills in which we have to demonstrate proficiency to graduate, and a clinician needs to sign off on each skill, which gets recorded in this booklet]).

However, between the major chest cold/sore throat I've had for the past 5 days, having a touch of insomnia anyway recently, sleeping on the couch a couple of nights ago since MM was snoring, and the dogs hogging the bed making it hard to go back to sleep once I wake up at all, I was TIRED today!!! I even started the morning with a medium blueberry coffee from Dunkin Donuts (sounds gross but was surprisingly good!) and it didn't do a thing. I was literally falling asleep all day long. We had a bunch of echocardiograms, which take awhile and involve many people packed into a warm, dark, tiny room looking at a little flickering ultrasound screen -- if I hadn't been standing up, I would have been out cold. I was also, unfortunately, too tired to really muster much of an interest in anything, which sucks. Especially since I got the only admitted patient of the day! He was a transfer from another service, and is currently in ICU. He's a very handsome, cuddly cat, and is clinically interesting, but I'm so tired that I just didn't care. I felt like, "Just tell me what I have to do, so I can do it as quickly as possible and go home to sleep".

Which sucks. And which does NOT bode well for doing clinical rotations with an infant! Holy cow. One of my rotation-mates just finished his large animal emergency rotation, and he said they had 120-hour weeks because there were only 5 students on the service. **120-hour** weeks!!! Working with freaking horses, of all things! During that rotation, obviously I'll have to live on-campus, which will take the baby out of the equation, but poor MM doesn't want to be a single parent for weeks on end! Hopefully there won't be many like that.

Anyway, I have a bunch of ECGs to analyze for discussion tomorrow, and then I'm going to bed. Hopefully around 7:30! I can catch up on sleep a little, and hopefully be fully functional tomorrow.