A Day in Inpatient Peds

 SAK PASE!!

So I started this post Friday night, it's currently 9:53pm and I just finished going over a block of questions on Amboss. In other words, I'm tired af so I'm definitely not finishing this post tonight lol.......

Okay, so I just finished my two weeks of inpatient pediatrics, I'm starting outpatient pediatrics on Monday at a clinic near where I live and I can't tell y'all how excited I am. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed my first two weeks but the rotation was in Broward county and it was about an hour drive there and an hour and 10min drive back because of .....SOUTH FLORIDA TRAFFIC. I'll miss the rotation but I will not miss that drive and the gas money I had to spend annnnd the waking up at 6am parts lol. I'm just writing this post to give you guys a peak into a typical day I had in inpatient peds. 

6AM: Okay so I wake up at 6am, not gonna lie, sometimes 6:15am and sometimes 6:25am. The times I wake up at 6a, I usually have enough time to sit down and drink my coffee and eat my breffus. I usually have a parfait for breffus or just plain yogurt and grapes. 

I leave my house at 6:45am on a good day, 6:55am on a bad day lol (bad days being when I wake up at 6:25). I get to the hospital and I'm on the peds floor by 8am always, most of the time before 8. To be on time is to be tardy :)

8AM: My first week, I was with a Family Medicine Resident who was on his peds rotation and another AUC student, she's a 4th year doing her peds Sub-Internship. So she's there for 4 weeks while I was there for only 2. Anyway, the first week, the Resident assigned us each our patients to present to the attending during rounds. So we would log onto the system and look at how many patients are on the peds floor and we would separate accordingly. So for example I would get a new admit and two old patients. The new admits are of course more work and more tedious because you have to look at their chart on the computer then go into the room and interview the parents and sometimes the patient too if they're old enough, then I have to do a physical exam on them. That usually takes some time to get the history. So the history includes the History of Present Illness (HPI), the Emergency Department course/stay (basically what the ED did to the patient before they got admitted to the peds floor), the birth history of the patient, past medical history, meds and allergies, immunizations, family history, and social history. Then, the physical exam. Then finally the assessment and plan. That was a mouthful but I hope I made some sense. 

This is for new admits....for patients who I've seen before I usually do a SOAP presentation,...Subjective info, objective info, Assessment and plan. I do that unless we have an attending that day that hasn't seen that patient at all yet. We usually have an hour and a half to do get ourselves ready before we started rounding.

9:30/10AM -> ROUNDS: All of the Attendings are different. One of them wanted us to present in the patients' rooms (nerve-wracking to say the least), two others had us present in the nursing station area, and one other had us present by the patient's door. So yea, in the two weeks I worked there, I worked with 4 different Attendings. I loved that because I got to experience the styles and teachings of different people. You guys I learned sooooo much from each of them because they each had different experiences to share. In my opinion, the hardest part of presenting patients to the Attendings is the Assessment & Plan part. This part requires you to think like an actual physician and figure out what your plans are for the patient and I always struggle with that part. I also have trouble with the medical terminology. Here's to hoping I get better with time. 

2-3PM: After Rounds is lunch. After lunch, we each get an assigned topic to search on UpToDate, we then have to do a short presentation to the Attending whenever he or she is ready. Then sometimes we go Round on our patients again depending on the Attending. This doesn't take too long, this is just to update the parents and to see how our wittle patients are doing. By 4:45-5pm, its time to go hoooommme! 

The second week was about the same as the first week...except it was just me and the 4th year student, the Resident had to move on to the next part of his training and left us :( The 4th year student helped me soooo much though. TBH if she wasn't there, Idk what I would do. I learned a lot from her. 

THAT'S ALL FOLKS. That's a typical day in inpatient peds. Here are 2 pics just cuz.....

TTYL💜