Another tiring week

It's been a week for another new posting, which is Internal Medicine posting. For the whole week, I have been very busy with studies and ward works. I started off my Medicine posting by Haematology (blood) and Renal (kidney) postings which have a lot of patients to cover, relatively more compared to Endocrinology and Rheumatology group. For this week, my group and I have attended all the ward rounds, where the consultant, lecturers and the doctors in charge will go bed by bed to discuss the issues on all the patients. What are we there?? To me we were just walking sponges following the consultants and lecturers just to absorb whatever they discussed during the ward rounds, which may become very useful for us in the future to decide how to treat patients.

Besides ward rounds, we also had 3 teaching rounds with 3 different lecturers, which made our schedule even more packed and we had to cover the old and new admissions whenever there is general rounds and teaching rounds. Not to forget about the night on-call, which is also a burden for us, luckily I have had 1 on the Monday, and thus no more rotation for me at least for the rest of the week. Hmm… not too bad, what made the conditions even worse is that this is the first week of orientation for our beloved freshies or first year juniors who just came to join my course started 2 weeks ago. To welcome them, we have special ways in making them a better juniors or doctors. For each session of orientation, all of my final year batch mates will have to come down to meet them and all of us had to spend a few hours in talking and playing with them, scarifying our study time. This had caused me to have severe sleep deprivation which I manifested during ward rounds, yawning non-stop!! So torturing and embarrassing……

“If you can’t withstand the stress of orientation, then you will never be able to withstand the stress of becoming a doctor!” this is the statement that I always tell my juniors where I got it from my seniors. It is so true, the stress of a doctor is much more than a stress that a freshie can meet during orientation, which I gradually can experience as more responsibilities are put upon me as a doctor to be in not a very long period. My stress is not only from the study and works, but also from the stress of sleep deprivation, which is even more severe during this orientation week. So tired, so stressed and so not simple of becoming a super senior......