The UTMB third years surprised me. After all that fuss about asking whether they had to come to work today, just about all of them showed up for work. I guess they didn't want to look bad in front of their attendings; smart move. I spotted another familiar face in the cafeteria today: Lori. She's doing an ob-gyn rotation here at Brackenridge, so that makes 4 from our class here so far. We don't see the ob-gyn people much except in the elevator or in the cafeteria, but I see Liza more often b/c cardio is part of medicine. She even attended this afternoon's lecture (led by Dr. C) on cancers.
Speaking of cancer...it seems like I get an awful lot of cancer patients. One of my patients, a man we admitted on Friday for LE swelling and a bad case of anemia (H&H was about 7/24), had an EGD/colonoscopy done this morning to see if he had a GI bleed. I saw him not long after he was brought back to his room and went to his chart to see what GI had found. Turns out he has a 1 cm bleeding sessile mass in his sigmoid colon, suspicious for cancer, among other polyps, and surgery has been called to evaluate him. I immediately called Zack to let him know we would not be discharging our patient today, and fortunately he was with Greg at the time and was able to pass the message along. "Better cancel the aspirin, too," said Greg, but surgery had already done that. I accompanied Zack to our patient's room and listened as Zack explained what we'd found (he took good care not to say the dreaded "c-word"), but the patient didn't appear too concerned. He was more interested in eating his lunch (he'd been NPO for over 30 hrs because he was supposed to have been scoped yesterday), which is understandable.
I asked Greg for some feedback on how I'm doing so far, and he said my physical exam skills were great but that when I'm presenting a patient, I need to focus on the important details (i.e. what brought this patient to the hospital) instead of the extra stuff (i.e. the patient is concerned about his erectile dysfunction). Good to know. I'm also hoping to take a day off on Thursday. I try to coordinate it so that I don't take a day off on the same day as one of the interns, and since Yan has tomorrow off, Thursday is a good choice for me. Dr. C says I'm doing well so that I can take any day I want off as long as it's not a call day. Fair enough, except since pre-call is usually the least busy day, I'll stick to taking pre-call days off for now.
On another note, congratulations to Ben and Susan on the birth of their baby girl! =)
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