First day fun

So ... as luck would have it, I may well have chosen the right career after all. Hm. Today was pretty damned awesome.

Some favorite bits of my 12-hour first day of surgery clerkship:

• Hearing a little girl who was running out of the elevator say, "I love the moving stairs! THEY ARE AWESOME!"
• Being reminded of how different the patient's perspective is when I heard patients try to describe their surgical, imaging, and medical histories. "CT scan" means nothing to a large portion of the population, but describing being stuck into a giant tube gets a good response.
• Time passes strangely without bathroom or lunch breaks.
  
• Taking my first real history with a real patient for a real doctor's visit and then discussing what we thought was going on with this very real patient. In reality. For real. WOW. IT WAS REAL.
  
• Finally feeling a part of a team - this sounds stupid, but I really like working with people to achieve good things for other people. It makes all the happy bits of me happier because I can go home knowing that life improved for someone else, and I got to be at least a teeny-tiny part of that. And someday, my part will be much larger.

Medicine is arguably the coolest job ever. Even though many aspects of med school suck. At least, that's my first-day impression.

So ... yeah! Hi! I am alive again! How are you?