Overwhelmed...

I hate medical terms.... I really really hate them.

The last two weeks have been a non-stop rollercoaster ride known as "Gastroenterology" which have left me ever so tempted to just pick up my bag, walk out the door of the Zoo and never return again. To be honest, any enthusiasm or noble aspirations I ever held about helping people are well and truly gone. I hate my job and I hate in particular doing medical terms.

Started last week with a huge patient list and a Korean reg who is known for his abruptness and comments such as "I'm a liver man... only bother to call me if the ALP has gone up by 5!".

Within 5 days I had 5 patients dischanrge themsleves against medical advice. Now so far I had only ever had 1 do that ALL YEAR, but in one week either my sheer exhaustion/incompetence or the crap-ness of this term made 5 people leave hospital while they were still sick and needing treatment.

Patient A staetd that he needed to leave to go and buy a house in Adelaide, then when about to walk out the dorr demanded a taxi voucher to get himself a few hundred metres home and when we refused called us 'lacking in compassion and lacking in brains.

Patient B came in witha multi-drug resistant HIV strain and had a UTI and rectal stranding on CT. Didn't take Einstein to work out that this was "what happens when you put things in places they don't belong" (to quote the Urology registrar). However the patient didn't like the smell of poo on the ward (it's a gastro ward for crying out loud!) and so walked out the door to take his chances without antibiotics.

Patient C had acute pancreatitis and kept ripping out his drip on a 6 hourly basis requiring me to keep stabbing him. He wanted to go off to pay some bills and when I said we advised against this he self-discharged and said he was oging to admit himself to St Elsewhere's where they have more compassion (don't let that door hit you on the way out buddy!)

Patient D had chronic abdo pain and kept wanting more and more painkillers yet everytime we saw her on the ward she was running around and chatting on the phone to her friends then would double over in pain the instant she saw us... who you kidding girly?

Patient E came under gastro becasue she had mastitis. That's right. Apparently tummy doctors are now the ones to treat infected breasts. So we were about to start some good ole IV fluclox when the patient's 'natural therapist' objected and even though we got senior advice from the 'lactation advisors' that this was an ok anti-bug to use, she still refused. And so we had a patient in hospital refusing treatment but still wanting to be admitted to the private hospital... why bother coming to hospital if you don't want our treatment?

I've concluded that gastro is the medical term you dump patients in when you can't find any 'real' pathology that a surgeon could chop out. We send half our patients home with no real diagnosis and I've consulted the 'chronic pain team' more in 1 week than I have all year so far.

Combine that with the fact that my reg is constantly scoping/never around and I'm totally losing the plot. I have no morale and feel sick each morning as I get up to get ready for work. I even had to walk out of the ward the other day to stop myself from breaking down. I even had the social worker run after me to check I wasn't about to jump off the building (although very tempting).

The med students look at me with pity and horror. The senior ones have stopped asking me for patients when they see the anger in my eyes. The junior ones I try to be nice to and spare them the horror of what's to come.

There's no sparkle in life right now. It's just day after day or crap (and this is what life will be like for the next 9.5 weeks)

The only thing keeping me sane right now is Coca-Cola, grace, the onset of spring and the weekend food outings with old uni buddies.