Hi guys!
Today (3/11/13) I shadowed a doctor for the first time. He is the director of the Emergency Department and has been practicing medicine for about 20 years.
Now on to my experience. The hospital I shadowed at isn't a major trauma center so it definitely wasn't like you see on TV where every patient who comes in on an ambulance has a gun shot wound or was in a major car crash. No one coded and no one went running to save a persons life. Really today's theme was sutures and abdominal pain. . . not the most exciting day of my life. But it had its perks. I had never seen anyone suture a real laceration. I mean I had done practice sutures on a pig foot during a summer program but I'd never seen it done on a real patient and trying to consider if the skin is strong enough or how to make the cut heal in a pretty manner.
The only other thing that was really apparent to me was how amazing it is for doctors to take the information from a patient history and additional labs and determine a diagnosis. For the ER the goal is to discover what is the cause of their complaint and how can that cause be fixed. Or if the patient has a simple problem like a deep cut to the face, then the solution is to simply put in sutures.
I am a little disappointed that there wasn't a big mysterious case that ended in a huge surgery, but that is the reality of being a doctor. There was a patient that came in screaming, seeing dead relatives and believing that the doctor was God, but really the only problem was she hadn't been taking her anti-psychotic medication.
That's all I have for you guys! Part of the reason for this post was to keep you up to date with my life, but to also help remind me two years down the road of what happened during my doctor shadowing.
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