Being a Doctor…

I’ve started working at the Royal Adelaide Hospital (RAH for short) and my first week was working night shift, which I’ve just finished. Now, starting work as an intern is pretty daunting, let alone finding out that I was starting on nights first. The intern rotations are  split into 10-11 weeks terms and the first rotation I am a reliever. This means that I will cover people who are taking sick days, or on annual leave. It’s a pretty good time to be a reliever because nobody is taking any annual leave at the start of the year, and not many people will be sick. So, the lovely roster manager Charmaine rostered me to be the “extra” on nights to give a bit of help to the guys who were starting first week.

I was on ‘Surgical Nights’, which involves looking after all of the problems with Surgical patients on the ward. I think there are about 60-70 surgical patients at a guess. I worked with a guy called Aaron, while there were three interns on ‘Medical Nights’ (Medical patients). Check out our little photo just before we started the first night.

Khoa, Me, Tsai, Aaron and Brendan

This photo was courtesy of Khoa’s LX3 camera and Khoa would like himself identified as the “hotshot doctor who led the crew.” The other guys haven’t requested any description of themselves, so I will quickly do it. Tsai is the “guy who loved to watch me sleep”, Aaron is a “gym junkie, wanna be orthopod who hates delirius patients”, and Brendan is the “trigger happy intern who will gladly prescribe intravenous fluids for whoever, whenever.”

Suffice to say that it was an eventful week on nights and the reward for working one week is one week off, which I have now. Apparently, working night shift reduces our life expectancy, so I’m trying to get my body back into normal day patterns. It was an eye opener into the world of medicine, with everything from prescribing morphine for the first time to patients dying happening over the week. There are not a lot of staff working at night, so much of it is up to us, but there is good support available when we need it.

More on my life as an intern to come…