The 85-Hour School Week

Hello there, friends and relations! I'm still coming to you live from Queens, New York. Well, nearly alive. Perhaps only mostly dead. I'm pretty sure Miracle Max could formulate something that would get me back in action.

Let me tell you a little about my first week in clinical rotations. Assigned to the OB/GYN department at Jamaica Hospital Medical Center for the first of what will eventually be 78 weeks of clinical training, I found myself on the corner of Jamaica Avenue and the Van Wyck Expressway this Monday morning not entirely sure what I was getting into. After all...OB/GYN? Babies? Mothers? Lots and lots of pain and screaming? Yikes!

We started the week with some paperwork and a bit of a tour of the Hospital campus. There aren't that many buildings, and the OB/GYN service is largely confined to one floor of one building. Unfortunately, as you may know, all hospital areas look very similar to each other, so it becomes very easy to get lost. It has taken me about a week just to find my way around, but I got the hang of the place after I managed to get my fingerprint scan working for the door locks (the doors lock to prevent code pinks, i.e., baby-thefts). Mondays are "education days" for the OB/GYN residents, and so we medical students spent most of the day hanging around listening to lectures, reviewing an article, getting fed (hurrah!), and just kind of getting to know each other. There are 8 medical students on OB/GYN right now, 4 from Ross University, and 4 from St. George's University. There is some mild competition between the two groups, but it's all healthy and not devious or underhanded. Med students tend to be competitive by nature, and a little competition to encourage extra diligence isn't a bad thing.

The bad thing about Monday: we received out schedule for the rotation. Every weekday, we report at 6:30 am and we work until our shift ends about 12 hours later. We typically have weekends off. However, to throw a wrench into the schedule, we are on 24-hour call every 4 days (q4, in medical vernacular), with a day off after your call day. That includes weekdays and weekends, so if you have call on Sunday, you arrive Sunday morning at 6:30, work for 24 hours, and then leave Monday morning at 6:30, getting Monday "off." It just so happens that we began call on Wednesdays, and my first call was on Saturday, so I had a 6-day, approximately 85-hour school week this week. Try it yourself, kids, and see how you like it.

In addition, the failure of the iPhone's alarm clock since the New Year and the general disarray ("General Disarray!" Salute!) of the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority have caused me some troubles with punctuality. I crashed with my good friend and college roommate Danny Wiederkehr for a full week and a half in his apartment in Stuyvesant Town, Manhattan, and the commute via public transit was on the order of 75-90 minutes. So, that's 12-13 hours at the hospital, 2.5-3 hours commuting each day, and we start to get into crunch time for my sleep. Today, I moved from Danny's apartment (thank you a million times over again, Danny!!!) to a place nearer the hospital, in Queens. I look forward to briefer commutes and a little extra time to get some sleep or food or whatever it is I used to get before I got to New York.

I'll send some more about the nuts and bolts of the rotation itself later this week. I'm post-call today, and I'm pretty tired, but I think I'd like to post each day that I'm post-call, so I'll be back in 4 days. Until then, take care!