Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Residency 1.4: Gold Team

Well, this is a few days late, sorry. You would think that now that I'm not on inpatient anymore, I'd have plenty of time for updating, but the fact that I don't have to be at the hospital for 13 hours a day means that I have a life: Gold Team dinner at Spin, Sisterhood, pumpkin carving contest (um, yes we did carve a Justin Bieber pumpkin), etc.

Gold Team was so many things, and I'm almost re-exhausted thinking about trying to write about it all. It's Endocrine (mostly new diabetics=easy) and GI (mostly a pain in the butt). There was some cool pathology that we saw (Wilson's disease, protein-losing enteropathies, autoimmune hepatitis) but mostly it was chronic abdominal pain kids and their crazy parents. There was one room I had to stop going into on rounds; I would wait outside, because otherwise I might have become very hateful. I think two things were about equally frustrating. 1) There was nothing medical we could offer these kids; the things that would help make them better (psych therapy, family therapy, etc), we couldn't really offer in the acute inpatient setting so they didn't get any better, and 2) They wouldn't accept that so we kept having to run expensive, meaningless tests to satisfy their neuroses. It's not the kind of medicine I want to practice. And yet it's so entrenched that there's not much changing it, which is also frustrating, because I don't want to bow to the system in defeat.

Apparently Gold Team is like this for everyone and you just laugh it off. And laugh we did. We made up all sorts of jokes to get us through, and I really did enjoy the day to day interactions with the team, in a I-am-so-ready-to-be-done-with-this kind of way.

This month is Teen Clinic (pray for me!)

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