Week 2: starting to get real

This week was amazing. I'm becoming more comfortable everyday in the clinic but I'm also realizing how much more I need to learn everyday, so it ends up feeling like one big step forward, a tiny steps back. I'm trying not to feel overwhelmed and focusing on improving everyday.

One of my most memorable experiences this week (besides doing a female and male exam all by myself!) was in my family practice clinic when I got to speak with a patient on naloxone therapy. Naloxone therapy is a therapy for preventing deadly withdrawal to heroin addiction. As a medical student the greatest gift I have compared to any other point in my training is TIME. I had the time to really get to know this patient. I got to ask her more than the usual questions about fevers, chills, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, constipation- I got to find out about this woman's life and how she became an addict. She shared her story with me and cried as she re-lived many of the decisions she wishes she could take back. As I told her I was proud of her for working so hard to get her life back on track, I realized that I was one of the first people to ever say something like that to her. It was with this patient that I remembered why medicine was so exciting to me in the first place- the real opportunity to impact and change a person's life.

My goal for the next few weeks is to remember to be excited and enthusiastic around the patients. I want the patients I work with to remember me as being excited to be able to work with them. Sometimes I'm focusing so much on asking all the right questions and doing the physical exam and remember it all to present to my attending that I forget that my main priority as a medical student is to know my patients better than anyone else around. This week I'm going to change that.

I also want to work on continuing to build confidence- even though I feel like I'm a long way away from being a real doctor, I need to start acting like one around my patients. I want to be more confident and self-assured around my patients this week.