Something To Be Thankful For

Thank God It's Over.

The worst rotation yet. I may have to retake the final exam again, because I just wasn't into it and didn't study that much. But on the bright side, I won't have to do another psych rotation again for the rest of my life. Thank god! That's what *I'm* thankful for this Thanksgiving.

The exam itself wasn't much fun, but we had an "unusual testing condition": one of my classmates started screaming a few minutes into the test. At first I thought it was in frustration at a particularly hard question, and I inwardly concurred, glad I wasn't the only one feeling that way. Then I realized he was having a seizure. I guess my autopilot came in handy, because I found myself directing the students next to him to lower him to the floor and the proctor to call help. I don't even remember seeing him seize before I got there, it's just kind of an unmistakable series of sounds. Responding to an emergency as it's happening is quite different from what happens to medics on duty: you get the dispatch, you get on the rig, you pull on your gloves, get your equipment out of the engine, walk up to the scene, and then you're finally there. That's plenty of mental prep time. But it's quite another matter when you're concentrating on taking an exam and someone seizing is the farthest thing from your mind! It's a little rattling.

Eventually the FD came, and we turfed it to them. Ironically, the neurology department was having their grand rounds meeting in the conference hall right next door, so one of the fellows wandered over. He didn't do anything, which further confirmed to me that emergency physicians are the experts at the first two hours of anything - then they lose interest and hand it off to specialists who pontificate endlessly the etiology of the illness at hand, but don't like to get their hands dirty. To add further irony, while my classmate discovered during this rotation that psychiatry was his calling, he inadvertently helped confirm emergency medicine to be my thing. Anyway, it made for an interesting, albeit a little bit sad, conclusion to psychiatry.