Residency 3.7: Gold Team

Gold Team (GI and Endocrine) is notorious in our program. Having kids with abdominal pain just brings out the crazy in parents. Like moms who prefer that their child get a G-tube and receive formula feeds when they're doing perfectly fine eating a regular diet. Or moms who spend 9 months seeing every specialist except GI, even though every other doctor says, "I think you need to see your GI doc" and saves samples of her child's spit which she wants tested for parasites. While we know that sometimes you just gotta play the game to please people, things often get a little heated. We had to call security twice this month ("They're gonna haul me off to jail for what I'm about to do!" -typical Gold Team mom) and stories about our patients made the rounds through Housestaff pretty quickly.

There was the kid who ate couches and had to have a huge ball of whatever couches are made of surgically removed from his stomach. The girl who ended up with part of a charm bracelet stuck in her appendix. Kids who ingested toilet paper, dryer bars, and household cleaning spray. I'm no longer surprised by what kids will put in their mouths.

And actually, we had a pretty decent month in terms of real pathology (as opposed to just the crazies). Bad ulcerative colitis, achalasia, hepatitis A, biliary atresia, pancreatitis, new diagnosis of Crohn's, etc. We also had a girl with a very severe bleeding ulcer who required 7 blood transfusions and emergency surgery which probably saved her life. The sad part about it was that we're pretty sure the situation was worsened, if not directly caused, by mismanagement at an outside hospital that does not deal with kids all that well. It makes it a little daunting to be five months from going out on my own, because none of us want to be that person that gets talked about the day--"They did WHAT???"

The Endocrine part of the rotation was good as well. Lots of new diabetics, but also some other interesting pathophysiology as well. As well as time for plenty of teaching. Yours truly won the steroidogenesis olympics for memorizing this and got a box of Christopher Elbow chocolates to show for it. We also got the opportunity to wear continuous glucometers which measure our blood sugar every 5 minutes and record it on a computer chip, which is later downloaded and synchronized with our record of manual blood sugar checks and charted. There's a site with two sensors that's injected and then taped to your body, like so. And then for three days we recorded what we ate (the massive amounts of brownies and donut holes we had to celebrate the end of the month wreaked havoc on my pancreas I'm sure) and when we exercised, etc. We'll see what it shows.

Still having no luck finding a job, since no one in Denver seems to even be hiring, which makes it hard to get interviews. Going to spend the weekend exploring new options and bugging people again. Back to the ER this next month, which should be fun. Until then!