To the Big House!

Rebekah likes to tell the story of our first day on Obstetrics and Gynecology (OB/GYN) as third year med students. There were three of us traveling up the elevator at Mission Hospitals: Rebekah, Blake Pemberton, and me. The ride up four flights from the parking garage was pin-drop silent. It was the first time she'd seen me with my mouth shut. She also says that I looked a new shade of pale, but I think that was just the lighting.

Truth be told, I was overly apprehensive. OB/GYN was the one rotation I was not looking forward to. It was my second clerkship, and though I was definitely nervous for Surgery six weeks prior, it was a different type of nervous. Everyone is nervy when they start third year. The comfort of the classroom is gone. Patients bite. Doctors bite. Nurses bite. Snakes bite. You realize you know nothing. For OB/GYN it was different. It was the kind of nervous I hope most 20-something males have when they realize that for the next six weeks they are going to be completely surrounded by female parts (in a clinical way). Lots of female parts, and they don't really know how they work...

Ma'am, I understand you are going through a lot of pain right now.
YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND MY PAIN. YOU WILL NEVER HAVE A BABY AND YOU WILL NEVER MENSTRUATE!!!

This is how I imagined most conversations would go. Also I would have to not smile when people would say the words "penis" and "vagina" (I made it the entire six weeks without giggling by the way - Mom, I'm so grown up!).

Anywho, I tell you that story to help you understand how nervous I was for this Monday (and by "you" I mean future Robby who will change the story in his mind about how cool, calm, and collected I really was). Here, as a fourth year, I was starting perhaps my most important rotation in medical school, and I had never even been to UNC Hospitals, my home institution. I didn't know where anything was, didn't know if my badge would work, didn't know if I would be able to eat (i.e. where would I steal food from?!), etc. Pediatric Surgery will be my only UNC rotation on my transcript, and I also need to garner a letter of recommendation (LOR) from a surgical faculty member. The pressure was on.

So we met at 6am in the PICU on Monday, and my resident tells me to go print off a "list" (list of all the patients that are on our service). Zero clue how to do this. When I sit down at the computer, I realize I don't even know how to log-on to a generic UNC computer. I ask the nurse. Ohhhhh, so you are like "new-new." Here ya go, honey.

I am not a "honey." I'm just new-new.

The administrative mayhem this week went from bad to worse. Absolutely nothing worked. My badge didn't open any doors until I got a new OneCard, and spent 20 minutes on the phone with the hospital IT people. My parking badge was an epic fail, and I accumulated two parking tickets along the path to fixing that disaster. I couldn't view radiology images, and I couldn't find my way to the operating rooms. Oh, and there are two third year med students with me that know a heck of a lot more about the UNC computer system than I do. #FourthYearFailure

But the OR is the OR, no matter where you go. Clean, sterile, precise. The rules are the same everywhere. So, for the first case I scrubbed in on with the attending and chief resident, I was ready. It was a laparoscopic case, so I was able to operate the camera. I did not induce motion sickness in anyone. I held the trocars in place when they were inserting instruments. I knew when to turn the lights away. I knew how to scrub. And when the attending asked, I told him I was a fourth year going into General Surgery. He replied, "Oh, that makes sense. I thought you knew what you were doing in here..."

FOR THE WIN!!!

Unfortunately, I think that was my only victory of the week. There is a steep learning curve that I have to climb on this rotation, and as my resident says, "Our goal in Surgery is to make sure you always feel barely adequate." Excellent.