P

My final rotation before graduation is with the Renal inpatient consult service. It's relatively long hours, and my classmates are pretty puzzled by my choice of final elective. I have relatively little defense only to say that I'm learning quite a lot, and I think what I'm learning will help me out during intern year. Besides, they have me doing fun stuff like collecting patient urine - nothing makes you feel more like a physician than having to say: "Fill this cup with urine, if you please."
Plus, tomorrow I get to watch them harvest a kidney from a living donor, then transplant it into a patient with end stage renal disease right afterwards.

If there's anything that's unpleasant, it's having to comb the patient charts for all relevant information. As a consult, you're dependent on the information that the patients' physicians write down in the chart, and seeing as this particular hospital has NOT switched over to electronic-based patient charts, I'm stuck there trying to decipher some pretty freaking awful handwriting. And if it's not the quality of penmanship that stifles me, it's the poor quality of the note, in which the physician leaves a note with minimal information, only indicating from a legal standpoint that - Yes, I did spend 2 minutes visiting my patient today, so pay me please. Those notes are usually from surgeons. Bastards.