Week one

By F1blogger August 2017

I’ve been a “doctor” for about a week now. My first rotation is on Intensive Care and Anaesthetics so myself and another FY1 rotate weekly on each. Some would say starting on Intensive Care must feel like you are being thrown in at the deep end, but in reality it’s a very well supported job. I’m never on my own and thankfully have two registrars on the Unit all the time to help me out when I need it. Then there’s the highly-skilled ICU nurses who are so friendly and approachable and I am already learning a great deal about how to deal with sick patients just from working with them this past week. 

My shadowing period flew by and the junior doctor I was shadowing was running me through the jobs that we are expected to do daily. For example, how to request bloods and look through the patient’s recorded vital signs on a brand new (to my eyes anyway!) computer system, how to fill out requests for X-rays and various scans on paper and where to take them, as well as attempting to describe to me where certain departments were around the hospital (which I’m still getting used to!). 

It’s safe to say that I was overwhelmed with all of this new information and was extremely nervous for my first day without my old FY1 to hold my hand. But Wednesday came around and we started on the ward round. Then I was given patients to go and see myself and carried out the various jobs throughout the day. It’s always scary making that first phone call to a medical registrar, for example, to come and review your patient if they need to step down from ICU to a medical ward, but with time it becomes second nature. The day ran (to my surprise) quite smoothly. What was very alien to me was having nurses ask me to prescribe pain relief and anti-sickness medication for their patients. In my head I was thinking that they know more than me about what to prescribe, they’d been doing this job for years and suddenly it was up to me to make a decision, and that’s when your knowledge from medical school comes in to play (and the BNF!).

Last week, I saw a patient who’d had a nasty fall down an embankment and when she came to ICU she was very unwell, needing respiratory support. Her journey to getting better is still ongoing and at the end of last week I thought I had seen the last of her as she was being moved to another ward. I wished her well and was so pleased to see her looking better and privileged to be part of a team that helped to make that happen. Then today I was walking into theatre and saw her walking with the physiotherapist outside her ward. She looked like a new woman and had the biggest smile on her face. It was so heart-warming to see. I know that this job is not going to be easy; the FY1 I was shadowing warned me that she’d had a testing year full of ups and downs. But seeing that patient much improved and on the path to full recovery today was definitely one of my “up” days.