Keep On Moving

It's Friday.  I finished my third week of clinicals today. Five more weeks to go at this hospital, then I transfer to another hospital for a psych rotation.

Today I got a taste of the future with a patient who had been transferred to the unit I'm working on for medical care from the psych hospital where I'll be in five weeks. I have a lot of sympathy for those kinds of patients, but also they scare me. This woman had serious, serious problems, but it was also clear that no one was taking care of her. Her hair was matted at the back, for example, which doesn't happen overnight. One of my fellow students works on a psych unit at another hospital and she was outraged on the patient's behalf. She pointed out the obvious lack of care to the patient's sitter (who spends her entire shift sitting at the bedside and who should be helping to see to the patient's needs) and the sitter was completely indifferent. Which probably mirrors the greater public approach to patients with mental illnesses. So try not to get any mentally illnesses, I guess. (There but for the grace of God, I swear.)

My own patient was an elderly man who someone compared to the husband from the movie "Up." I've never seen it, but if it's about an elderly man dying of a broken heart, they nailed it. The strange thing was that this patient shares a birthday with Dave. Which is weird, right? Anyway I hope when I'm gone, instead of laying down and giving up, Dave thanks his lucky stars and moves on to someone worthy of him.

I got to use some of my inept Spanish today, too, helping to care for a patient who doesn't speak English. So that was fun.

And speaking of inept: our lazy, inept substitute instructor let us go two and a half hours early, which is fine because it's Friday and I only got a handful of hours of sleep and I have a slew of assignments due by Sunday, but also, she gets paid for those hours, I'm sure. So, my tuition dollars at work there.

I came home and left my MRSA shoes on the porch and I got out of my scrubs and into a robe and ate my lunch and lay down to cuddle with Gray Kitty for awhile. I should get up and take a shower and get started on my homework, but I'm feeling very...blah. After all this time, I'm getting used to starting out days exhausted, with too little sleep, but I come home wracked and just wanting to crawl into bed. Yesterday when I got home, same thing. I lay down for an hour nap and got up four hours later.

Later:

I did get a nap in and woke up just before Dave got home. We were just starting to discuss what to have for dinner when we got a text from Chris and Grace asking us to come out for dim-sum, so we ran out the door to do that.

We're home now and all I want to do is crawl back into bed and sleep.