I Survived

I survived my first day of residency. It was about 10 hours plus about an hour and a half of total commute time between multiple sites. Not too bad. I did feel utterly lost and clueless for most of the day since most of my time spent learning how to act on clinical rotations in medical school did little to prepare me for rotating through a busy clinical lab.

We had some more orientation stuff this morning, and will continue to have some more during the week. It is mostly about how to take call, which mainly involves responding to blood bank issues. I desperately need to brush up my hematology lab stuff tonight and to learn about protein electrophoresis. There's a lot to learn about the clinical lab.

I still have to get some basic administrative stuff taken care of, like computer access at the multiple hospitals I will be rotating through. It will make life, and my daily task of approving lab tests, way easier once I can actually get some information about the patients. The techs I met seemed very nice and were familiar with lost new residents appearing in their lab every couple of months. Lab techs are the equivalent of nurses in terms of education and training, so they can really be quite helpful.

Anyway, I need to go and read, which I think is going to be the story of my life for the next 4 years.