hell of the south.

no, i'm not talking about my brother's wife or toxic her family. what i am referring to is my new place of work for the next 28 days: the cardiac intensive care unit, or ccu, which is located in the south pavilion of my hospital. actually, it's only the next 25 days since i started last tuesday, and then minus the 4 days i'll have off it's only 21 more days, which really isn't that much.

being in the ccu is both good and bad. it's good because it means that i survived my internal medicine month, and good because i am halfway through the 2 months in a row of call, and good because at the end of this month i have 2 weeks of vacation. and it's bad because...well, i am on call again every 4th night. other than that, i guess it's not so bad, although there is the potential.

i am trying to be positive, which i know is contrary to the theory i espoused earlier, but i'm getting a little tired of being cranky all the time. so i am going to give the whole positivity thing a shot. on that note, i will describe some of my positive experience from internal medicine. the first thing, and what made it tolerable, was that the people were fun. everyone was pretty mellow and easy-going. some might see this as a euphemism for "lazy" but this is not true! there are some of people out there who word hard when it is necessary, are quite intelligent, do their jobs well, but don't take themselves too seriously. i was fortunate to work with some of these folks the past month--one of them is destined to be a Chief Resident next year, so she is obviously no chump (you get selected by the faculty for this position from a class of about 50 or so).

we worked hard, did well by our patients, and got the hell out of the hospital when the work was done. there was a tacit agreement that we all liked medicine, wanted to learn, but that we also wanted to enjoy our personal lives, so we should all work together to make sure everything was completed in a timely and proper manner; but there was no needless standing around or staying at the hospital until an arbitrarily determined "appropriate" time (deemed by many to be at least 4pm, sometimes as late as 5pm). sometimes it is necessary to stay late, as people are sick and need care, but there is no reason for 5 people to stand around with their thumbs in their ears when all their work is done and nothing is happening. there is almost nothing that will throw me into a rage as fast as time wasted in the hospital when i could have been anywhere else. fortunately, this was not a problem for these like-minded individuals, and i was grateful.

anyway, this is heading into a negative direction, and that is not in fitting with my new MO, so i must desist, as we all know where this attitude leads.