This is just awful. I haven't posted anything since New Year's Eve!!
I haven't given a good account of PA school or rotations. I've been busy. I really don't know how many people are actually reading my entries, but I'll write anyway.
So I started my first rotation in Pediatrics. I was suppose to go the clinic I use to work at, but it didn't work out. My old clinic is 9 hours away from me. I went there after my drill weekend, which is 5 hours away, and 2 days later had to take the 9 hour drive back to start my rotation at another clinic - a nice big triangle going from my house to drill, to my old clinic and then back home. It was nice to see all my old coworkers and family but I was really looking forward to working. I ended up completing my rotation at the clinic I did my Applied Learning site a year earlier. It was nice to see familiar faces but the language barrier got me again. By the end of the rotation, however, I was able to understand a lot of Spanish and I can speak a few phrases and use a few medical terms in Spanish. It was a good rotation. My preceptor acted as a translator toward the end of the rotation. I was able to exam, diagnose and treat the pint size and some super-sized children by the end. I felt very confident when I suggested a therapy and my preceptor agreed. It makes me think I actually did learn something in my didactic year.
The end of rotation exams were crazy hard. We have 5 week rotations, but 4 1/2 weeks are actual clinic time and then the last 2 days of the 5th week we take an written end of rotation exam on whatever specialty we were assigned and a skills exam. The written test is hard. I thought I studied but I guess not enough. I did well, but the test made me feel like I didn't know anything.
One thing I can say that is hard about rotations and the exams is that sometimes it is hard to distinguish between what the book says and what actual happens in real life. One thing they don't teach in PA school is how health insurance can affect the way you practice medicine. There are times when we had to not treat a patient, the way the book says, because the insurance didn't pay for a type of medication that the child needed. So you go with the next best thing, which is not always the best. But what can you do? For a lot of the patients I saw, the parents were on Medicaid and couldn't afford any medicines that Medicaid did not cover.
I will continue again tomorrow and Friday with the following two rotations. That way I can make up for lost time.
