Saturday, August 2, 2014

Residency is nothing like Grey's Anatomy

It's been a month since Lee started residency so I thought I'd give you a little update of what life is like for us.

Just in case you don't know - Lee is one of 6 first year Family Medicine residents with Florida State University at Lee Memorial Hospital (wow it is so hard to not say St. John Hospital anymore... you'd think the name would be easy for me? haha!).

After some orientation and training sessions, life saving re-certification courses (or something like that), and a trip to FSU in Tallahassee for more orientation and another test,  and probably lots of other stuff..... Lee began seeing patients this past month!

He is currently on in-patient medicine - which means he sees people that are patients at his clinic while they are admitted to the hospital.   In addition, one day a week he works in the clinic seeing patients that for the next 3 years will be his patients.  So when they ask who their primary care physician is they'll say Lee. Kinda cool huh?

I'll be honest, when I heard about the clinic days I thought like.... strep throat, ear infections, the flu... but he sees such a wide variety of illnesses and diseases.... and some really, really serious.  I knew he'd see this type of stuff in the hospital, but I thought the clinic would be more of a general learning experience about you know, how a clinic works... but it's really got him working hard and keeping him on his toes.
The hospital is the real world, life and death situations every single day.  Obviously this was the case during clinicals as well, but now he's a little more involved.  Now he's one of the decision makers.  It's stressful.

On top of this he also has certain designated nights where he is "on-call" which means if a patient is admitted to the hospital after hours he is in charge of seeing them and setting up their care.

Right now he is on day 6 of 12 days in a row.  Four of the past 6 days he has been on-call.
He's working a lot.
The past couple weeks most days he has left the house at 6AM and got home after 8PM.
Today however, he was on call but was able to come home around 2!  If they had got an admission he would have had to go back to this hospital but thankfully they didn't and he was able to spend some time with me and Leo... because if you think about it 6a-8p are all of Leo's waking hours :(

They passed a law not too many years ago saying that residents can only work 80 hours a week... but that is an average for the month.  This week he'll probably top 80 hours, but in a couple weeks he'll have a day off here and there so it'll average out.  Crazy huh?

And for days off.  He gets 4 per month.  Sometimes he'll have to work a couple weeks straight before getting a day off. :/
But, on the positive side he gets 4 weeks of vacation per year!  That's pretty good actually!
Unfortunately our first week of vacation this fall he is going to be using to prepare and take the USMLE Step 3.
Yes, here is a THIRD step to those awful tests. 

Anyway, there are a few plus sides to residency... mostly food.
Haha, but seriously.  They have a nice doctor's lounge where he can eat all his meals and get lots of snacks (he may or may not bring me home a surprise every day ;)
He has his own office and computer where he can work on patient notes.
They gave him an ipad.
He has a couple really nice new white coats with his name on them.  I've only seen them on facetime as he's yet to bring it home for me to see in person........... probably afraid I'll take a picture and post it online or something........... :) 

Overall for me, I don't have too many complaints about residency thus far.  He could be home more often, but this is what I expected and was prepared for.
Lee might have a different opinion... but I don't think that we've either one been too surprised yet.
We are so happy to finally be on the other side of medical school and no longer paying tuition and rather earning a pay check!  If you're super interested in what his salary is you could google it, it's public knowledge what residency programs pay.  And while it's not what people probably think of when they hear doctor, we are thankful!  The thought that every two weeks we climb farther and farther out of this pit of student loan debt is a great feeling.  


As for the title of this post...
I might have started watching Grey's Anatomy on Netflix.
And I have a love/hate relationship with it.
I'm only on season 5 so no one ruin it for me (although lets be real all those #dontgochristina hastags on facebook a few months ago have at least let me know that she doesn't die yet... )
So while Lee is at the real hospital working hard and Leo is napping away I can be found watching this foolishness and commenting to myself - yea right!?  They would not let a resident do that!  


1 comment:

-STEPHANIE said...

Ahhh residency! It's a love/hate relationship. Love the paycheck, hate the hours. Josh's 4 days this month are 24 hour periods for the most part. So he might work Friday, get off at 7pm and then have to be there to work all night on Saturday at 7pm....to me that does not count as a "day" off...but it is what it is. Glad Lee is liking it though. Josh is too. But we are in the same boat as far as him being gone during Ryan's awake hours. We'll survive though. Maybe I should take up watching Grey's? I never got into it but I might find it comical and it would be something to do when Josh is gone overnight! Miss you girl!

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