Sunday 5 September 2010

Not dead!

Wow, has it really been a month since I wrote that last post? That means that I have been working for a month as well. I guess that I underestimated just how busy I would be and this blog has been pushed to the background. I would promise to update more frequently from now on but it would be naive of me. The thing is, I just don't have the free time that I was accustomed to as a student, and when I am free, normally sleep is the thing that comes to mind, not blogging. Make no mistake, I'm going to keep this blog going, it's good to know that it's there when I have the time. Just don't expect daily posts, that's all. I'm going to aim for a "quality, not quantity" approach I think. Whether I succed or not, I shall let you, the reader, be the judge...

So what's been going on? Well, like I said, I've now been working for over a month as an FY1 doctor in O&G and it's been quite an experience. There have been highs (being successful at every cannula over a week) and lows (missing three cannulas in a morning, bringing my successful run to a quite catastrophic halt). The best thing I've done so far is assisting on a caesarean section on my first morning, and being the person to push a baby out of its mother's abdomen, then cutting the cord. All in all, a very surreal experience and I felt very privileged to be able to participate in this. The worst moments are the inevitable moments of self-doubt - the "am I really good enough to do this?" moments that I'm sure are normal to all newly-qualified doctors. Pharmacy have saved my skin on one occasion (I love the hospital pharmacists - every last one of them!) , and although I was merely prescibing what I had been told to, it's my name on the prescription and therefore my responsibility to check that what I write is correct. I certainly learnt from that experience and will make sure that I'm more careful in future. Also, an angry patient and her relative tried to make me the focus of a complaint when I had done nothing wrong. This was dealt with fantastically by the senior ward staff but it's still confidence-damaging.

My first bleep - that was a special moment of course. I was sitting at a computer in the library going through the mountain of junk emails that the hospital trust sends me every day when it happened. I calmly walked over to the phone outside the library (pulse racing of course - I've never felt more like a "real" doctor) and rang the extension....only to find that it was the ward sister asking me to rewrite some paperwork because it had been done incorrectly. A bit of an anticlimax in the end.

I haven't yet had to do any on-calls. This is because my job in O&G is supernumary (i.e. no one would notice/care if I didn't turn up for work one day) and so I'm not included on the on-call rota. I feel that this is a mixed blessing. When I see my colleagues being bleeped senseless, running about stressed muttering about "post-takes" and the like, I feel a bit left out - a bit "doctor-lite" if you know what I mean. I've put my name on the list of surgical locum F1s and so I hope that I will get to do some on-call if the general surgery rota is ever a bit short and I'm available. There are a handful of us supernumary F1s in the hospital and it seems ridiculous to me. There are unfilled general medicine/surgery F1 spots on the rota and here I am, doing a specialty that I don't particularly like and where I'm not particularly useful. Yet the trust will pay twice my salary to locums to cover the shifts that I would be more than happy to do. And we wonder where NHS funding can be saved...Anyway my next placement is respiratory, widely recognised as hell on earth when it comes to F1 jobs so I shall more than make up for my lack of work at the moment.

That last paragraph makes it sound like I'm sitting around in the mess all day drinking tea and playing snooker. This isn't quite the case. Just because I'm not needed doesn't mean that there isn't work for me to do, particularly on gynaecology where I'm often working 10+ hour days. I don't mind this too much - it's good to be busy and the more time I spend working, the more I learn. So yes, I am working hard, just maybe not quite as hard as the poor souls who are on-call for medicine/surgery.

This has become an epic-length post so I think I'll leave it there. Hopefully I shall update you all again in the not too distant future.

Simon

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