Family Medicine: Endless No-Shows

I don't know what was going on today, but I arrived at the clinic at 8:00 and we didn't see any patients until 8:45. Four no-shows. Who knew there'd be so much free time at a JPS clinic? I forgot to bring anything to study and ended up browsing through a dermatology textbook (and occasionally grossing myself out) looking for images of skin conditions I've seen. Did I mention I saw a case of Mollescum contagiosum on a kid yesterday? It was a classic textbook case, especially when magnified by an otoscope. Yesterday I mostly shadowed Dr. RR; today I got to see a few patients on my own. It's hard to find patients for me sometimes to see b/c most of them speak Spanish only and I only know OB Spanish. I'm starting to pick up a few words like otra vez and abra la boca, but that's not enough to conduct an interview with. Even Dr. RR, who's way more fluent than I am, needs an interpreter sometimes. *sigh* Needless to say I sometimes feel useless in the clinic. We did have a funny moment when the nurses couldn't read Dr. RR's handwriting, and when they got his attention, he couldn't remember what he'd written either. Fortunately he'd been talking out loud when he wrote his note, so I remembered what he'd written as "Healing well." Everyone started laughing as the nurses talked about how Dr. RR's handwriting is really bad, a fact he was willing to admit.

Today during lunch I drove by the future location of the clinic, located on the same block but in a brand new building reminiscent of the HCW. I'm going to keep my fingers crossed that I'll be around to at least set foot in that building, just to see what it's like. There was a dedication/opening ceremony for the clinic this afternoon so everyone got out early. Lucky for me, I guess. During the week I normally get one sort-of-half-day (7 a.m. - 3:30 pm)