Life as a Houseman

Omg where to start? So many things have happened to me for the past few months. The tears Ive cried so many nights especially during the first two weeks in my working life. I felt like my energy was continuously drained out with no mercy. Sometimes I felt like I will shut down anytime, but deep down I know one way or another I have to go through it all.

Life sucks in the beginning. I had to adjust myself to the system. Learn as quickly as I could. As though my brain was electrocuted after all that holidays..all those wonderful carefree holidays.

Every morning is like being in a marathon. You wake up in the morning, you have all the plans in your head. What blood investigations to take for which patient, have I arranged a CT brain as ordered, have I endorsed the medication as told? All these questions would come up to my brain all at once. I stepped out of the shower thinking what kinda hell my boss would give me today. And this is a routine,every single day.

History taking is very very important. I couldnt stress more on it. And if you want to impress your bosses, you should take a good history. You need a good history to present a good case. And taking history is kinda tricky. Unlike in local medical school, they are trained like mad into history takings, they have like a whole semester dedicated to just taking history and present cases. Man, you guys over there have no idea how hard and how long it took us to get used to the history taking. I was lucky because my senior HOs helped me.

To be able to go oncall, you must perform in your tagging days. I requested my tagging to last a bit longer since I have no confidence to start my oncall that time. I spent my tagging period going to the hospital as early as 6am and stayed in the hospital as late as 3am in the morning. With other hospitals you get to go and do a tagcall,and you will be paid for tagcall. Tagcall is tagging oncall where you follow your senior HO doing oncalls. Unfortunately, in my hospital we dont have tagcall. I stayed late as my own initiative to get more cases to present to the superiors.

But once you survive your first month, everything would sail better, if not so smoothly. You would then look for your old friends from medschool to catch-up, and you would find that somehow you can smile when you go home. It wasnt so bad after all. Adjustments adjustments and more adjustments.

Everything would flow smoothly insyaAllah. You just have to be brave and know your limitations. And you have to also know when to seek help.

My first entry on my houseman-ship experience. More to come later.