Eat...sleep... pancreas!

Today was food day. After working on a surgical rotation for 3 weeks now I think I'm shedding weight at a rather fast rate. The constant walk between the ward and theatres/clinics is about 500m and so I make this trip about 10 times a day and am burning off all that adipose tissue I put on whilst doing psych in Whoop Whoop.

But today was time to put it all back on. We had the weekly meeting with the bosses where the drug companies feed us hot bagels with bacon and eggs and fruit and muffins and juice and theres always tonnes left over. After stuffing my face before the bosses arrived (always good to eat when they are not around so you don't get asked a question by them with a mouthful of food) we had one of those highly specialty-specific presentaions about some new urine test to detect bladder cancers (with a 4/5 false positive rate! it's as bad as PSA!)

We then had a professorial ward round with the head of the department and we bowed and scrapped and laid down palm branches for him and blew trumpets as he walked onto the ward (well not quite... but pretty close to how it went) He charmed all his patients with his refined genteel British accent and joked with them about fire hoses (referring to their bladder function).

Then he nicked off to go chair some meeting about incontinence and told us all (med student, intern and registrar alike) go home and read up about bladder physiology. During my time on the wards I have noticed we have these posters about incontinence which advertise a rather useful government service. Another shining example of the government's effective public health prevention campaigns. A truly ingenius initiative, tailor made to the web-savy patient.

It's www.toiletmap.gov.au

That's right! The Federal Govt went to the trouble of documenting the location of every public toilet in the nation. Never again do we have to get caught out looking for a loo. Therefore since we have such a map, let us draw near to the bowl with confidence... and let us not give up micturating together as some are in the habit of doing.

"Australians all let us rejoice for we are young and pee"

My registrar made good on his promise today and bought me lunch which was very nice for a surgical reg to do. It's kinda as close as they'll get to saying "well done!" so I took it as a compliment. As we were chatting he was telling me about his internship many eons ago and about some advice he was given by his surgical registrar all those years ago.

"Always eat when you can... always sleep when you can... and NEVER mess with the pancreas"

Such wisdom is never unappreciated... esp the pancreas bit!

I decided that since my reg had been nice to me, I would be nice to my med student to thank her for helping me with so much of my work. She's literally saved me hours of discharge summaries and preadmissions so it was the least I could do. So we actually left the hospital building and walked up the road to have coffee. I realised that there actually IS sunshine during the day. That life exists outside of the Zoo during the day.

Having eaten so much food and wasted most of the morning I decided to do some real work and went back to the ward. Got to remove a nephrostomy tube all by myself (registrar just said "cut it and pull really quickly!" - thanks for the great supervision there! haha) and afterwards the patient gave me the biggest reward of the day. She told me I was a great doctor and that she believed I was in the right profession. She knew my old 3rd year clinical tutor and said that if he taught me, I must be one of the best (ok, now I'm starting to blush). She said that she knew that doctors must get a lot of complaining patients but that she wanted me to know that she would always be thankful for us, for they way we help people and the way we treat people with respect. She told me that whenever I had a bad day I was to remeber her words and she hoped that in some way this woudl keep me balanced.

It was like a divine intervention or something. After dealing with my awful NESB patient all week (who is still acting like a pork chop and causing me grief and sleep loss due to nightmares), I was so humbled by this lady's kindness to me. All I had done was take time to listen to her and not pull her nephrostomy tube too painfully and she knew exactly what I was feeling.

I walked out of that room humbled. Somehow amidst all the rubbish I had to deal with, that simple honest gesture of thanks had made it all worthwhile.

It made things right again in this crazy world.