Day one - and sticking to it!

The events of yesterday have really haunted me over the last 24 hours.  I had a really restless night sleep, waking up on several occasions and struggling to get back to sleep without spending ages obssessing over it all.  And as a result, this morning I didn't really feel the whole "bright eyed, bushy tailed" thing going on... far from it.  I felt really unrefreshed and not very proactive.  So it took me quite a while to get going and get to the wards.  But I did, by about 10am.  And I clerked a patient.  I was fairly happy with how it went.  Not sure I would have got his diagnosis if I had been the doctor that first saw him, but flicking through the notes afterwards, I don't think that his first doctor did completely, so that was reassuring.  What I was most happy with was that I really nailed the timing, had 10mins to spare, which I'm really proud of.  And yes there were a couple of things that I forgot (kicked myself when I remembered afterwards), but they were pretty minor, and would have most likely only accounted for a couple more minutes at most.  Timing was definitely something I struggled with last year, so it's an improvement.

I had teaching over lunch and then my coursemates and I sat around having a really mellow half hour before heading on with our days.  I did a little bit of work, and finished writing up my examination from the morning.  Then I hit the wards again.  Annoyingly took ages to find a patient who didn't have visitors, wasn't asleep, wasn't confused, wasn't acutely poorly and wasn't immediately post surgery.  It was so frustrating and quite a waste of time.  But I did find a lovely patient to clerk who had an interesting story and was very sweet to talk to, although she did ask me to stop before I had finished my examination as she was getting a lot of pain and couldn't cope any more.  So that was a little disappointing, but totally within her rights.  And I reckon I was doing ok timewise, so happy with that too.

And that's it, I did my two clerkings that I had aimed to do, and I feel really good about it.  I'm sure I'll get a much better sleep tonight and feel more pro-active tomorrow.  And dare I say, shall I aim to clerk three patients?  Might be pushing it, so maybe will set a MINIMUM of two instead.