Stumped about what to do for residency? Here’s the ultimate guide for career choice. Alfred Padilla, one of the endocrinologists up at Greenwich, graciously sent me his Venn diagram. It doesn’t include all the specialties, but you can extrapolate from the data:

medicine euphemisms, medicine

I’m working on night float this week for the Heme-Onc service. This means that I take all admissions coming in, and manage the floor patients. The one perk of this job is not having to write progress notes in the morning. The flip side is that you have to deal with otherwise stable patients who go berserk at night. Aside from my pager going nuts occasionally, the hospital itself is relatively quiet.

medical resident work area

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medicine coca-cola, medicine, work

Several months ago when I was on the surgical oncology team, we ran the patient list in the surgical conference room on the 4th floor every day.  There’s  a shiny plaque on the door that looks like this:

4th floor conference room door

I later found out this guy on the door is Mehmet Oz‘s dad, who was also a CT surgeon.  Jeez, this guy and his family is everywhere. Mehmet Oz is one of the CT surgeons who’s an attending at my med school. He’s everywhere–on Oprah, on XM Satellite radio’s Oprah channel, on Discovery Health Channel, in books, magazines, you name it.  I remember that he gave us a lecture about homeopathic living once. “Put your olive oil in the fridge, drink [nasty-tasting-previously-thought-to-be-nonedible-substance] every morning…etc”.  I remember him talking about giving the patient headphones with Mozart playing in the background because it helps speed recovery.  Yeah. I’d give the guy headphones too, because we surely don’t want the patient to overhear us jamming out to AC/DC tunes intermixed with occasional swearing by the surgeons in the OR.

Anyway, this guy is a smart man, and a great marketer.  Also a weird coincidence that I’d end up in the small town where this famous guy grew up.  I feel privileged.

medicine life, medicine

One of the phrases I hear often in the hospital is this:

Nurse 1: Is he the resident?

Nurse 2: No, he’s the intern.

Last time I checked, an intern is a first-year resident. I suppose that at my current hospital, there is unspoken hierarchy among the nursing and ancillary staff that the “intern” is the dumbass carrying the team pager while the “resident” is the one who should be called in an emergency.  The atrocities do not end there, mind you. Read more…

medicine medicine, rant