136: 7.2 Lines and squiggles

Today has been a long day. Tomorrow is the last day of my acute medicine rotation, and I am done. This fast paced environment is just not for me. Seeing patients for 1 hour and handing him over to relevant teams, it feels like I am barely involved in their individual care. I miss having conversations with patients and families, even the hard ones. When the oncology or palliative team comes to review patients on my ward, I sometimes look longingly at them, quietly saying, "Please take me with you! I do not belong here!"

My next adventure will be with intensive care. Where cases are more complex and intellectually challenging. I can't freaking wait! There, I would hopefully have more time to spend with each patient. Not like now, where between paperwork and actual clinical work, I am just frantically putting out fires. Just enough to make sure all my patients are stable.

After the evening shift tonight, I hitched a ride with my friend home. We were talking about what we enjoy and didn't enjoy about the job so far. She is a fact person - she likes knowing what is going on all the time, areas of grey scares her. She likes numbers and charts. And there is me, the complete opposite - I thrive best in the grey. I love complexity - be it medical, social or emotional. I do my job for the connection and the stories I have the privilege to have access to. In a way, medicine is beautiful in its way that it caters for all types of personalities. It needs many people like my friend, and equally they need many people like me to work together in giving the best care possible to our patients. We need numbers and we need colour. We need the science and the art. One of the many reasons I can't imagine doing little else than what I do everyday.