1st Day of Mentoring

So, as the title says, I had my first day of mentoring this past Wednesday. It was a lot of fun! Let me back up a couple of days though. Before we go to on our mentoring we were supposed to call a couple days ahead of time and find out what time we should show up, how we should dress, anything that we should bring (stethoscope, otoscope, courage), and just in general anything we should know about before we get there. Well I tried getting ahold of my mentor, and his office was closed when I called. So I waited until the next day I could call and he wasn't at the office because he only works there part time. Great! lol Well he left his cell phone number for us to be able to contact him by, but for whatever reason I have this thing with calling a professional of sorts on their personal phone. Does anyone else feel that way? I don't know maybe I am just weird or something. Anyway, I ended up calling on his cell and leaving a message on his voicemail. Of course, as my luck would have it, he calls me back right when I am about to get into my car to go get dinner quickly because my girlfriend had to get going for work soon. Oh well, no big deal, just figures I guess :-)

We got to talking on the phone about the details of what was going to happen on Wednesday. Well after all of the official stuff I had mentioned to him that I was pretty nervous. He told me to not be nervous, that truthfully at this stage of the game he really doesn't expect a whole lot from me since I am only about half through the first year! He said that mentoring is something that is supposed to be fun and a way of getting your nose out of the books for a bit, getting to actually see some things in the real world and learning some things along the way. He said most of my learning will come next year when I am actually doing rotations and seeing patients everyday all day. (Yikes!) After our conversation I felt a little more relaxed because he sounded like a really nice guy and made me kind of realize that they weren't going to throw me into a room with a complicated patient problem and expect me to know exactly what to do and solve the problem, all on my own!

Well, even with the conversation we had on the phone, when I turned the corner Wednesday morning and could see the building of the practice I started to get pretty nervous, not as much as I expected, but certainly enough. I got into the office, introduced myself to the lady behind the desk (one of the nurses) and should told me to go on back and that my mentor was in with a patient and that I should just go on in. I got into the room and was greeted with a pretty warm welcome from both my mentor and the patient, which was quite nice and sort of set the pace for the rest of the day.

I didn't do a terrible amount of stuff this time, but I expect it was sort of a "here's the office, and this is what we do here" kind of 1st day. I got to do a heart and lung exam on just about every patient we saw and was able to ask the patient questions that I had and got an idea of how charting outside of the classroom, actually goes!

All in all I think it was a really good first day. My mentor is an awesome guy and a truly caring provider. Also, the rest of the staff really made me feel like part of the "fam" right away, which was really nice. I feel very fortunate to have this as my first mentoring site. Oh, and probably one of the coolest things was I got to order my lunch from Red Lobster because we had a rep come to the office! Ha ha! It was a pretty good day! :-)

However, we are only at the office for the first part of every Wednesday, and then it is back to lecture! I left the clinic on a high and then was brought right back down after a 5 hour renal lecture!! It was an interesting mix of feelings throughout the day. From nervous to drained and everything in between.

We are a little more than half way through our renal module. I am a bit behind on some things, so I am hoping to get all caught up this weekend. I honestly love the weekends because everything just stops for a couple of days and we get to make a mad dash to figure out what in the hell they were talking about! :-)

Oh, and BTW, the Derm module went really well. I either studied really well, the test was fairly easy or maybe a combination of the two. Whatever it was, it felt nice coming back from a break and rockin a module that was only 1 week long! Especially after not doing to well on the last module that we had before Christmas break (Cardio).

Keep fighting the good fight!

M-R