The clinic is not my world or my cup of tea. Yet it seems to wind its way into the other parts of my life. I look forward to my time at the hospice inpatient facility. I actually want to get there early. With clinic, I get excited if someone cancels. I don't think that's right at all. With the inpatient palliative unit at the other local hospital, I don't mind getting in early or staying late. I want to do research on how to better care for my patients. I look forward to my weekend rotations there. I feel like clinic is useful, but I don't like the anxiety of the time constraints and then the infinite things to follow up over the course of the year. It's the work on top of work. It's the fact that it never lets me go. I'm always having to interrupt something else for the sake of the clinic. I've literally only had one day in clinic so far, and am not excited about the next year's worth of it. I know there are worse things out there. I know that I do still help patients. It doesn't really feel like palliative care sometimes. Certainly some patients have symptoms other than pain, but most of the time it's pain. And then the calls are people that didn't listen when the pain contract was discussed and ignored the fact that if their pain worsens, they are supposed to call us, not suffer in silence until they've run out of medications. It's going to be a long year. I hope I can work on finding more meaning in the utility of clinic. So far there seem to be few people how have any semblance of optimism.
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