Family Medicine: The Happy Ending

My last day of Family Medicine. I should be cramming for my shelf exam tomorrow, but I just wanted to take a moment to make note of all the things I will miss after today. Yes... miss. I can't believe I'm actually getting nostalgic about a workplace, but these are the people I've been seeing day in and day out for the last six weeks, and for a person with utterly no life (a. k. a. med student), that's a big deal. They were like a second family! I'm going to miss the lady from the front desk who is perpetually asking us if we've eaten because she's seen med students hit the floor in dead hypoglycemic faint before. I'm going to miss the PA at the charity clinic who speaks Spanish so that even I can understand it. I'm going to miss the kooky attending, the attending who accused me of being in Slackers Med School, and the jaded (but jolly) fellow.

My preceptor was something else-- literally taking my hand and pushing it toward instruments while he performed procedures, holding onto my hand with the instruments until I was confident enough to do it myself. I sat in the hot seat and performed a cryo on cervical neoplasia in an HIV+ patient today, something I only wish all my other student colleagues could have the opportunity to do. I'm going to miss that teaching. I'm going to miss the nurses: sweet, crazy, caring, always prepared with coffee. I'm going to miss the little flags on the walls next to each exam room that made me feel so included-- red for patient, blue for nurse, yellow for doctor... and white for student (yes, student! we get our own flag!) in the room. I'm going to miss the schedules taped up at the nurses' station. I'm even going to miss the clock on the wall near the computers. OK, now I'm going a little overboard, but still... the place has its own rhythm and I had finally fallen into step, but now it's time to move on.

On a lighter note, I actually volunteered to do a rectal exam yesterday. You're probably wondering why a sane person wouldn't run screaming away from the opportunity to stick a digit up someone's ass. First of all, you've probably already figured out that I'm not sane, so that cat's out of the bag. More importantly, though, I was doing it for the patient's sake. You see, I was seeing a patient with Dr. Sausagefingers, and if you could just have a look at Dr. Sausagefingers' digits and then compare them to mine, you might see how compassion would move the heart of a young medical student to take mercy upon the sick and ailing, even at the cost of having poopy fingers.

OK, I'm done grossing you out.