The first of several job orientation sessions took place today, from 9 to 5. It was pretty exhausting, but in a good way. The last year or two of courses being taken as prereqs for medical school admissions really managed to replace a lot of the initial excitement of my decision to leave law for medicine with stress focused on tests, application essays, letters of recommendation, and all sorts of other things that seemingly tried to drown a bit of my soul. This orientation reminded me how fun/neat medicine is though, and how exciting it can be to work with it (or even just around it in an emergency department setting).
The bulk of the time was spent learning the basics of how to chart patients. I'm still learning how it works of course, but the general gist of it is that the form used looks at the HPI (History of Present Illness) to attempt to codify each patient's situation. Things looked at include the location of the injury, the severity of the injury, the timing of the injury, the duration of the injury, the context in which the injury took place, the quality of the injury, any modifying factors, and any other associated signs and symptoms. The ROS (Review of Systems) is a second set of items that is looked at, and includes the PFSH (Past Family and Social History) as well as the physical exam which will look at the Global (general) system, the Eyes, the Neck, the Respiratory System, the Cardiovascular System, and various other systems.
To chart all this down, we get to expand our vocabulary with hundreds of new words. We get to learn about Bradycarida (a cardiovascular rate under 50), Scleral Icterus (the yellowing of eyes), and all sorts of other stuff. We'll also get to associate what conditions match up to what symptoms. It's like taking a course, really, except we get paid for it.
Then to take notes and write down the charts, there's a whole set of abbreviations as well. I'd put them down, but they're not all /that/ interesting on their own. I'd put up an example patient history, but the one's in the materials we got handed are probably copyrighted/not my intellectual property, so I'd hesitate to put it up on the internet. And I haven't learned how to do it well enough to put up a perfect example of my own yet. Maybe I'll get around to it later.
I still have to take my drug test, and that's been set up now. I can go anytime over the next week, but I'm hoping to knock it out tomorrow. I'm still on percocet from my surgery, but have more or less cut that down to one a day. For some reason, I'd feel weird not taking one on the day of my drug test, but bringing the bottle to explain why I'm testing positive. At any rate, I'm going to try and do that in the next day or two, and then I'll finish stopping the percocet completely.
I also need to fax a copy of my vaccination records and get another TB test, but then I'll be pretty good to go. ... for a second orientation, that is. It looks like the start of my real work is still a ways off, although I'll be shuttling around between the HR office and the Hospital quite a bit. Anyways, I'm pretty excited again, and think things are looking good.
I suppose that calls for a new background on this site, so I'm going to go see what I can find to mark this watershed moment.
