Today I decided to get the true experience of what the doctors and nurses go through and I woke up at 5am so I could get there by 6:20am. Boy oh boy was that quite the change for me. I must admit, I hit a bit of a wall about 3 hours in, but the interesting cases kept me going!
Now that I’ve been shadowing at the Cary Skin Center for a while, I’m able to help out a bit more because I know the routines and what needs to be done. Whenever there is only one nurse in the room for taking a layer, I run the layer up to the lab while the nurse blots, cauterizes, and bandages the wound. When we have a little down time, I run up to the lab, check for slides, and page Dr. Flynn if there are any for him. Whenever he clears a patient, I erase the layer number on the whiteboard and write “clear” in red. It’s been super fun and gratifying to help out everybody and I feel like I’m part of the staff!
I like to joke with the staff that because of HIPPA, most of my blog posts are “Today I saw people with spots on body parts and we removed those spots at their various locations” which is actually fairly accurate. Today was the first time it came to my attention that some older patients have cognitive problems and how scary it must be to have someone cutting into you and you suddenly forget where you are!
I included a fun little image of doctor humor, mocking the bad handwriting of doctors. 