First Day of Work

Today was the first day of my internship at the Hospital de Santo Espirito de Angra do Heroismo. I was shadowing Dr. Claudio Olivero. Easily one of the most fun people I've met. His English is flawless; he did his undergrad at McMaster University in Canada, but he must have lived there longer than that. Anyway, when we got there at 9 am (got up in time this morning, holla), he sat us all down and basically gave us a rundown of what was going to happen. In a nutshell, he said that he was really supportive of the idea of us coming in and shadowing different departments and whatnot, and was really glad that we were here. Apparently there was a large departmental conference going on between several departments in the hospital, so a lot of those departments were severely understaffed. Dr. Claudio was picking up the slack, which meant he was assigned about 50 different things to do at any given moment.

He showed us around the hospital for a little bit, and then told us that only two people could be with him at a time while he did rounds in the emergency ward. Unfortunately, there were 7 of us there, so we had some decision making to do. Eventually we decided that Aisha would go with Dr. Claudio's friend in the pediatric unit, and a few other people and I would head back to the Residencia while two other people stayed. After a few hours, we would switch. I came back to the Residencia and did pretty much nothing until about 2, when the people who had shadowed in the morning came back. Nicole and I then went back to the Hospital and found Dr. Claudio still doing rounds.

Dr. Claudio had told us to watch out for "the haters," which were other doctors/nurses in the hospital who did not want undergrad there. I think this is something at every hospital; the places I have shadowed in the States have all had nurses and other administrators who give me the evil eye/get haughty when I or my mentor comes by. I can understand some part of this; in a lot of cases, untrained people in a hectic medical scene can get in the way...that has definitely happened to me more than once. On the other hand, how else is someone supposed to get experience? It's not as if you learn something more between when you're an undergrad/high schooler and when you're a first or second year med student. You could argue you learn a lot about ethics and whatnot, but which part of that isn't common sense? At its core, you're just talking to people.

I'm really impressed with how good of a doctor Dr. Claudio is. He told us from the beginning that he was overstretched today, because he was covering what seemed like 50 departments at once. Nevertheless, he took his time with every single one of his patients, and talked to us to great extent about ancillary things. Apparently his mother is really into Hinduism, and Claudio really wants to marry a traditional Indian girl, not one that will "drag her sari through the market" (whatever that means). We talked a lot about this, but he never forgot about this patients. He seemed to genuinely care about them.

After a few more hours of seeing patients, it was time to go.

Can't wait to go back.