this is my life.

An update on what I'm doing these days:
4:30 or 5:00 wake up and get ready
5:30ish At work; once there, I start collecting information on how my patients have done overnight, look up their new labs, see if any of the values are abnormal, think of a way to correct whatever is abnormal, and calculate how much the patient ate, drank, and peed. Then I go look at the patient and hope that I can understand whatever I'm seeing (I asked for backup the other morning because I didn't know if a baby had an abnormal heart beat or was just hiccuping. Thank God it was hiccups). Then I write all the things I discovered on a sheet of paper that will go in the chart.
7:00 my Senior Resident comes in and I tell him what I found and what I think, and he tells me whether I'm being reasonable or being an idiot (luckily I'm on pediatrics and the people are too nice to ever actually tell me I'm an idiot even when I am one).
8:30 lecture one some educational topic. Bagels are provided (yay!)
9:30 rounds are scheduled to begin
10:15 rounds actually begin. Try and sound competent while presenting my patient. Pretend not to be thinking "WTF?" when asked if I think that my patient is on an adequate dose of a drug that I memorized for a test I took last October (I have no idea, but I can tell you that its side effects include loss of taste, cough and a rash!)
12:15 meeting re: Medical Ethics. Ethics training in one hour. Lunch and cookies are provided.
1:15 lecture about some pediatric problem. The last one was about UTIs and the resident brought us candy.
2:30 see interesting patients and try to absorb some drops of knowledge from the attending physician.
3:45 hope that I don't have enough experience/authority/power to do anything else useful for the day, so that I can go home. (I'm willing to stay and do stuff if I can actually DO stuff, but more often the medical students are forgotten because everyone is busy with patients and we wait around for a while until someone notices that we're there and then dismisses us)
Afternoon/evening: attempt to get my life together, study for the shelf exam, write a 10 page report about a patient, etc.
8:30 go to bed pooped.

Highlights: I figured out why I don't have any financial aid, and it should be coming in later this week. I also diagnosed a patient with milk-alkali syndrome this week (you get it from eating lots and lots of Tums while drinking lots and lots of milk) proving that the hours I spent looking up random useless info on Wikipedia last year weren't completely wasted!
Lowlights: my hand hurts really bad and I'm about to start writing aforementioned 10 page report. booo.