ICU: Good news

I keep forgetting that with Dr. P as the attending, rounds start at 8:30 and not 8:00 this week. Still, that allowed me to take my time writing my notes and not have to rush through them (as I tend to do sometimes). The 20-year-old girl I saw yesterday is doing better; we didn't round on her this morning b/c she was in the angio lab (again). Both of my regular patients are doing okay, but today is my mediastinal abscess lady's 30th birthday. Who wants to spend their 30th birthday lying in a hospital bed, trached and sedated? It was a bit sad, and Tony didn't make things better by saying that he turned 29 on Friday and no one said a word. Dr. P said he heard a joke about women turning 30, but as usual I missed the punchline. *sigh* I'll say one thing for Dr. P, he's very organized. When we enter a patient's room, he expects to have the round reports in one hand, our progress note in the other, and the CXR up on the computer screen within a minute. Thank goodness I know Kindrick's user name and password for MagicWeb; it helps me bring up the images faster and helps us run more efficiently. At one point Dr. P said, "Come on, you don't want this to be like rounding with Dr. ML!" To this, we all agreed he had a point.

Noon conference was the most boring talk ever (I don't even remember what it's about); Garrett read articles online (on my PDA, blc I let him borrow it) while I doodled notes to a "Gavotte" from La Corda d'Oro on my styrofoam cup. Afterwards, Dr. C told me I'd written a good admission H&P on our heart-failure patient and suggested I look up her condition, "isolated noncompaction of the left ventricle." I found an image on UpToDate, and basically the LV chamber looked like it was full of trabeculae instead of being a nice smooth chamber. "That's what makes her prone to thrombi," said Dr. C. "The muscles there can't compact against the heart wall." Yikes. After that lesson, Kate let Garrett and me go home at around 1:15 pm, so we left.

I got a nice surprise in my email when I got home: two residency interview invites! Amazing, considering that our school still hasn't uploaded 1-2 of my letters to ERAS. At any rate I'm not complaining =)