The Rural Hospital: Whip Crackin' Polka Songs.

So now that my first rotation is over and my evaluation turned in, I can blather on about it without any possible retribution. Take THAT, "system".

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Rotations are analogous to slavery. In fact, it's worse than slavery. You have to PAY to do peoples' bitch work. Ok, true, true, I'm not beaten, nor studded out to some other slave to form new, little slaves, but it's still a heaping pile of BS. They fooled me the first day. As soon as I walked in, I was given a gent dose to do by some physician. Now, I know I praised the place on the first day, but it was an elaborate ant trap. Sure, they wooed me at first with their tasty nectar of doing dosing and having an actual physician interaction the first day, but after that, the poison of checking outdates every 5 minutes for a hospital with 12 patients in it got monotonous and stab-self-in-eyes-with-spoon-18,000-times-in-a-row painful. The following is a summary of my "work week"

Get up at 7:45 AM, leave at 8:15AM, arrive at hospital at 9:00PM.
9:00AM. Do technicians' typical work. Restock ER, restock night pharmacy.
9:15AM. Do nothing for 105 minutes. Work on projects you are supposed to do at home.
11:00AM. Do cart fill.
11:15AM. Eat lunch (Free to students. The hot dogs are good. Everything else is questionable.)
11:45AM. Do nothing for an hour.
12:45PM. Go out to floor, write down info from patient chart.
1:00PM. Regurgitate what you wrote down to preceptor. Make on-the-fly interpretation of said chart.
1:15PM. Go home. At 85 miles an hour. Down a 2 lane country road.
1:40PM. Arrive at home. Play Gears of War on Xbox Live until 3AM.
3:00AM. Go to Sleep.
7:45AM. Repeat 4 more times. Tuesday and Thursday there is no cart fill. Thus I do nothing for 2 hours prior to lunch
Addendum - Friday
12:00PM - Go to IDS (Inter Disciplinary Sessions). Talk with medical students/nurses/dental students about various cases. Be frightened that medical students don't grasp the idea that a long time undiagnosed diabetic presenting with greatly elevated BUN and SCr probably has decreased renal function. (In fact, they needed my fellow pharmacy student to explain the whole pathophysiological/etiological pathway. Yikes.)
2:00PM. Go home, get Sarah, go to Dave & Buster's up in Pittsburgh for weekend.
Repeat week X 4.

Now occasionally, there were excursions from the normal flow of mental beating, but typically the excursions were worse than pickin' their proverbial cotton. Like the time they had me spend 2 hours checking the whole hospital for expired drugs for the month of November on November 29th, then made me check the whole hospital for expired drugs for the month of December two days later on December 1st. They didn't seem to care that this idea defeated the purpose of doing something on a monthly basis, but, hey, not my hospital. But that's how it seemed to work all month. You know...just making me do bitchwork for the sake of making me do bitchwork. As much bitchwork as can be squeezed in. Not that I blame them or anything. They need to keep their techs relatively happy. They have slaves in the form of rotatees that need to tapdance to their whip crackin' polka song to do the morale-killing work.

Then she got on my case for wearing my nice black wool pea coat around the pharmacy over my shirt/tie. I did this because it was 55 degrees in the Rph holding cell and I was about as comfortable as a guy being given a colonoscopy without some sweet, sweet Valium. Anyway, she gave me a 3/9 on my midterm evaluation on professionalism citing I wasn't "professionally dressed." Yeah. This from a woman walking around in Winnie-the-Pooh scrubs.

Oh well. I passed. I probably shouldn't complain, I was given very little work to do, got great hours, and got tons of free food all month long. I'll roll with it and move on to Mylan Pharmaceuticals. Home of generic Prozac caps, Buspar tabs, Imitrex tabs, and Duragesic patches. I'll have serotonin syndrome, but be too high on opiates to realize what's going on. I have no damn idea what I'll be doing there, but it should be great. No patients. Just me and the drugs. That's how I like it.

As another side note about the above, if you have an Xbox360, DO NOT buy Gears of War. I warn you. You will no longer have a personal life. I swear to God, I'm addicted to that shit. It's like video game heroin. In fact, they used to give heroin addicts copies of Gear of War at addiction clinics, but stopped after they realized the addicts were less productive in their lives on Gear of War than heroin. Hell, I'm gonna go play it online right now. WVURx is my gamer tag if anybody who actually reads this damned thing wants to shoot and kill a digital representation of me.

Till then ~~~
Apathetic.