Poop Police

I finished my first week of rotations. Crazy. It has been a LONG week. I feel like every patient we get has metastatic cancer. This means that their primary cancer has spread to other parts of the body- which is not good. These patients sometimes get chemo or experimental drugs to see if something helps or to just make them not feel so "crummy."

I wake up around 6 am if I am feeling up to running. Running around the campus has been the best way for me to get the "lay of the land." After getting ready and packing my lunch, I walk about 15 minutes to my rotation site. Depending on the day, I try to get there anywhere before 7:30-8:15 AM. First thing I do is work up patients. Working up patients means that I go through patient profiles and look at their vitals and medications. One of the preceptors refers to us as the "poop police." Most of patients with cancer are on narcotic pain medications such as oxycodone which can leave patients very constipated. Actually I had a recommendation this week to add Senna S (stimulant laxative) to a patients profile. I'm pretty sure we spend most of our day talking about bowel movements. We ask every patient, everyday.

At 8:30 AM I meet up with the physician, physician's assistant, nurse practitioner, and my pharmacist preceptor for rounds. We fill the physician in on the patients and what has been going on with them and any recommendations we have. After talking about all the patients on a floor that are ours, we go into their rooms and talk to them. We usually finish this around 11:30 AM.

At noon, I usually go attend the noon conferences. Noon conferences are presentations that are given to the medical residents. I go because I am still trying to learn about different types of cancer. This week I have learned about breast cancer, non melanoma skin cancer, and lymphomas.

The afternoon is usually spent making sure everything that was discussed in the morning rounds was done. If there is not much to do on that, I work on my activity logs and write my interventions. Everyday I have to write what I did during that day and grade myself. Additionally, I have to write two interventions. So, when I recommended that Senna S be added to that patient's profile, it counted as an intervention and I had to write about it. I also have topic discussions with pharmacists. Earlier this week I learned about Melanoma and today I talked about Anthracyclines, ifosfamide, and cituximab/rituximab/Hertuxin (all different drugs used for cancer).

Basically by the end of the day, I just cook dinner and lay around my apartment doing nothing. It is nice to not have tests and exams- nice, but weird.

Welp, hopefully the weather holds up so I can be a beach bum tomorrow :) (probably bad timing since I just learned about melanoma and non melanoma skin cancer, but oh well.)

xoxo