So yeah. I don't really know what to mention here. These rotations are a bit of a joke and everyone knows it. It sucks that this rotation is so close to the beginning for me because i'm ready to learn, I'm ready for my butt to be handed to me and to subsequently become a more bad-ass doctor.
Instead, I sit here and get about 2 intubations a day and go home at noon. Get so bored at home I clean and panic about how I'm not learning anything. hahaha. Panic mode meltdown.
Then 2 weeks later, I just walk around the ER for a few hours everyday ultrasounding random people to try to teach myself how to use the machine. In ER, the ultrasound machine can become a great tool for diagnostic purposes and can help rule out acute, life-threatening problems faster and more efficiently than any other modality. (Gallstones, ectopic pregnancies, elevated intracranial pressures in the eye, AAA, hypovolemia, blood in the belly, and other more mundane uses like abscesses and guiding IV access). However, at our program at least there is nobody to train us. {EDIT: there is officially, but that person is never around and tends to be a sports med person, so unless its a torn muscle, don't ask}. This frustrates me, as they give me a couple of videos to learn from then let me loose. And I can only train myself to the point where I don't know what I'm looking at or how else to hold the probe to get a better image. At one point an upper level came to help, but she knew almost as little as I did.
This month generally bodes poorly as it reflects for me that I won't likely know how to use ultrasound effectively when I graduate here. And its been generally a huge emotional downer, because nothing takes you down when you're ready to learn and be challenged like nobody giving a shit. There is nothing else to do but sit back and study for step 3 and hope next month will be better.
For those of you interviewing- look at your possible future program director. Are they the kind of person who will get things done or do they have a lot of "filler" rotations. I really should have asked these kinds of questions... but then again, I dunno if they would have told me about them or not.
