Peds Inpatient

I just finished my first week on the peds inpatient rotation. I'm on the Red team which means we cover the pulmonary, cardiac, and also general peds patients. Aside from the specialty patients, the clinic-med (general peds) patients we have fall into two categories: the mysteries, and cellulitis. There was a rash (forgive the expression) of Staph skin infections this week, but none under my care. My patient was in the mystery category, and since he was completely non-verbal, it was pretty tough to figure out why he was in pain.

It's surprising how little we contribute as 3rd years. I hadn't realized just how little we actually do. There are 4th year students doing sub-internships who are in charge of admitting patients, writing orders, etc, and I though that the 3rd years would be doing things more like that, but we really just do H&P's, and fill out oceans of paperwork. It's not for nothing that 3rd year rotations are called clerkships. Our children's hospital doesn't have an EMR, so everything is done in paper charts scattered all over creation. I really don't care for writing things out longhand, and I can't read half of what the attendings write. If you're going to take the time to write something, why not make it legible? If you don't, you might as well not have written it at all. Generally, I do enjoy the inpatient side of things better, even though my role is less useful than it was in outpatient.