My last day of medical school

I got to the hospital at about 6:00 am in the morning and none of the other doctors / team members were there yet. I decided to round on all of our patients that we were caring for and treating. I would enter the room of each patient and ask them how there night was and perform a focused physical exam depending on their pathology and also look for any new problems. I would then check with the overnight nurse and document any overnight complaints or problems. For example one of my patients had tried to escape and was found outside having a cigarette. Noted. I really did not mind this as this patient has terminal cancer that has metastasized throughout his entire body and his days are numbered. I had to tell the patient this was not wise and that he could not just leave and smoke. In my mind I was thinking "smoke 'em if you got 'em" at this point.

Another goal of pre-rounding on the patients is to followup on all of the consults, and procedures we had ordered from the day before to see what kind of progress had been made. Did hospice come and see patient #1? Did social work find a nursing home placement for patient #2? Did anesthesia do the epidural for patient #3? Did the infectious disease doctors see patient #4 and make their antibiotic recommendations? Did ortho come by and evaluate patient #5 who is recovering from the total hip replacement they did several days ago and have still not followed up, despite numerous calls and begging attempts. The answer to all of these follow up questions at the government hospital is unfortunately no.

This makes the day's work frustrating and stressful as I need to followup with the various specialties and needed services and kindly beg to get the work accomplished. I was all over it and started making my calls to there various doctors and one by one started to get the list taken care of and checked off. While doing all of this I have to document everything and of course deal with new situations that pop up. The nurse will come in and exclaim "Patient #2 has low blood pressure, what should we do?" I would respond accordingly and make the orders and run them by my senior to verify that he agreed and we would move forward.

The day was busy and there was not a lot of time to think about how this was my last day of medical school. Finally at around 6:00pm my senior looked at me and said "isn't this your last day?" and I replied triumphantly: "Yes" and he said "go home already!" I quickly grabbed my stuff and made a dash for the exit before I could get pulled into another crisis. I walked out the front door of the hospital and walked toward my car. I was dumbfounded and even emotional but it still had not sunk in that I was done.

I am done....