Despair

I will make no attempt to be coherent or grammatically or politically correct. This job has been pretty rubbish so far (I say 'so far' as I need to believe this in order to get up and go into work tomorrow). As the only house officer in the team, I get stuck with all the rubbish while I have 3 useless SHOs who know even less Medicine than my surgical SHOs did- in other words, I'm not learning anything from them and they are competing with me for what precious few learning opportunities there are. The nurses don't care about the patients - they actually grumble when you ask them to do more frequent blood pressure and pulse measurements on sick patients, the ward clerk doesn't file the notes properly and the whole attitude just pervades the ward. Which incidentally is a dump. And is located on the 6th floor, and 2 of the 3 lifts are broken. Patients are neglected - one man ate nothing for 10 days and the nurses didn't even bring it up on the ward rounds. It wasn't until I looked in the notes (he was admitted before I started work here) that we found out. More than half our patients are simply sitting on the ward waiting for a nursing home place - until they come down with a nasty hospital-acquired pneumonia. (But more about my gripes with nursing homes and granny-dumping another time.) Our ward is the only one without a doctors' office, which means that if you so much as sit down for 5 minutes to check blood or xray results or write a discharge letter, the nurses will come and hassle you for something that you've either already done or were going to do anyway. The doctors' mess is damp and dingy, its telephone resting on a chair with only three and a half legs. I've tried my best to be positive; I've smiled at and chatted with everyone, taken the time to go through the notes, sat and explained things to patients, explained things to nurses. Kept up with my log book of things I've learned (so far: how to manage hypercalcaemia, diabetic ketoacidosis, how to do a lumbar puncture). Its exhausting, and as I've said before, the emotional aspect of it is the most tiring. After a hard day of empathising with people you just get really irritable and its a struggle to even be reasonable. At least the recurring 'work' nightmares - when you go to sleep but your dream is just an extension of your work day and you wake up exhausted - have stopped now.

And at the end of the day, I come back to my room in the old block of the doctors' accommodation. All the other house officers are in the new block down the road - apparently my application was received late. But that was only because they sent it to the wrong address - twice. My room is heated by a bizarre system of pipes that runs all along the wall and that you can't adjust. With the result that the inside of the wardrobe is toasty but the rest of the room is usually freezing. There is no hot water in the basin or the shower, and the tap water is brown. There is not a single pot in the kitchen. But I could live with all that if it wasn't so lonely. Which is made worse by the fact that the phone line is dodgy - it just about works, but there is a loud ringing sound that drowns out all conversation, and slows my modem down to 40K. Have not felt like eating properly so have existed on instant noodles (cooked in my own non-stick frying pan) and breakfast cereal, and lots of fruit for vitamins. And bottled water of course. I had been too busy adjusting to my new job to realise how rubbish my living conditions were until yesterday. And yes, I did get on to the housing people and threatened to take it to the BMA, but they don't have a better room for me until Feb 28 so I have to put up with this for another two weeks. At least I have my mobile phone.

And so its back to work tomorrow. (and I am working this weekend too - I have three thirteen hour shifts to look forward to - not). What do patients know about the s**t doctors have to put up with just to be doctors.