Work, again

My job is sort of a hectic one I guess. I work 7 days a week. Half days on weekends if I'm not on call. I've not applied for a single day of leave. Although Market Place is just 1.2 km away from where I stay, I've only been there once since I started working in June.

It's even worse when I was in the ward 23 in which the consultant would come at 7 am. This means I had to wake up at 5.30 am and punch in by 6 am. Just nice for me to review my patient before he arrived. 

Medicine was kinda frightening in the beginning.Yet, with the passing of time, you know what to do. You roughly know what's urgent and what's not. 

In the Malaysian hospital setting, there's such a word called 'jonah' which literally means bad luck. When people say you're jonah, it means that emergencies tend to happen more when you're on call. And yours truthfully is definitely someone well-known for my jonah-ness. 

I still remember there was once I had to attend to a lady with dengue fever with compensated shock and another woman in the same cubicle with massive lower GI bleed with impending shock simultaneously. And the thing I dislike most is having to attend to patients who need multiple immediate referrals at very ungodly hours. Because it means you won't get to sleep the whole night. 

Despite all the tension, there's joy. I've been working in the coronary rehabilitation ward for the past 1 week. I had a great learning experience. Got to see things like atrial flutter, ventricular bigemminy, sick sinus syndrome and ventricular tachycardia. There's once I did a carotid massage for my patient who developed supraventricular tachycardia (SVT) and it's thrilling to see on the cardiac monitor how it instantly disappeared.

Yes. It's very rewarding to be able to do good to your patients. Simple things like correction of potassium levels and rehydration in dengue fever. Nothing heroic. But, you will feel great because you know you have the ability to help people with your medical knowledge, albeit at the biochemical or cellular level which is not noticeable.

And did I mention about the hot and sweet registrar I've been working under for the past one week? Totally my type. And I even helped him punch in and out. Haha. Perhaps, part of my joy came from him.