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

Mentoring Setup Woes

Well today I sort of get an ear full. Not really bad, but enough to make me realize I messed up! Yikes!

Let me explain ... before school started in the Fall we got this packet of info that had a bunch on information in it and some instruction on what to do with some of it. Part of that information regarded immunizations. Well, to try and make a long story short, I misunderstood what it was that we were supposed to do with our immunization information and almost ended up not being able to mentor. What happened was I thought, for some reason, that the only reason they wanted us to give our imms records to our student health center was so that they could look it over and tell us what we were missing and what not. For some reason it didn't click in my mind that the only way they can verify that we actually have our imms done is if we give them the information that we have on them. So instead I found my information on the MCIR (which is basically a database of imms records from childhood on) and found out what I was missing and what I needed to get. So I went and got that stuff done. Turns out I was supposed to give that info to our health center on campus as well! OOPS! So now I have to get up earlier than needed for class so that I can figure out this mess, because we need to send out this info to our mentoring sites by Monday.

Moral of the story? GET YOUR IMMUNIZATIONS AND THE TITERS DONE AS SOON AS YOU CAN!! It is just a mess when you don't follow/understand the directions completely lol! Also, for the parents out there, make sure your kid gets his imms done on time and when they are young. It's a pain to deal with when you are older and you have received your Hep B shots from three different providers!!!

M-R

And So It Begins

Greetings from my local coffee shop. I am typing this entry on my phone because I thought this place had free wifi and it turns out you have to pay for it. So since I am not going to do that let me apologize now for any misspelled words and aweful grammer.

With that being said hAaappyg NeW yeer! :-) OK, for real this time Happy New Year! Another year come and gone. Well classes started up again this past Monday. The morning before class started my gf had just gotten home from work (she is a peds nurse), and she asked me how I was feeling about classes started again. I was honestly having mixed feelings. Besides the fact that my stomach was upset because it had not required to work before 12pm over break, I was excited, anxious, sad, eeger, and scared outta my mind. I was sad because I knew that school starting up meant that the time I would get to spend with my gf, and friends, was going to be cut extremely short again. It was going to go back to seeing eachother for maybe an hour or so over dinner, if we are LUCKY!

I was excited and eeger because it meant that we would be working and getting closer to graduating. Also this semester we start mentoring. What that basically means is that for one half day a week we work/follow a PA or doc and actually get to start seeing patients and practicing exam skills we know and taking patient histories, and even practice writing orders and diagnosing patients! However, this is also the source of my feeling of anxiety and fear. Wait, you mean you are sending me out into the world?!? Hold it, you want me to see REAL patients and practice on them!?! Hang on, you want me to show my mentor what I am made of and be aggressive enough and put myself in situations that give me opportunities to do this!??! O....K... Ill do my best.

Lets be honest here folks, this is sorta terrifying lol. What if I look like a complete putz and leave my mentor wondering, "Is this kid really in PA school?" What if the patients I see think I am a fool and ask to see the actual PA/doc because I clearly do not know what I am doing? Am I ready for this? I guess I better get ready, because ready or not they are sending me out. If you get sick don't go to the clinic for awhile! :-)

To be honest, I do have those things running in my head, but I am honestly excited and, I believe, ready to get my hands dirty (so to speak). I have been told that it gets better and the more you DO the more comfortable you become. However, I've also been told that if you are not somewhat aggressive it is really to just sit back and sit in the corner watching and never doing. However, that isn't going to help anything. I WANT to get more confident. I WANT to get more comfortable, and I WANT to look back on my mentoring and know that I got out of it everything I could, and sisnt waste any opportunity or chance to learn and improve.

Well, we don't start that for a couple of weeks. Right now there is a more pressing issue and that is that we got a great welcome back gift from our program. We started dermatology, guess what the 'gift' was? Hey, welcome back, how was your break? here's your derm book and oh yea you have A WEEK to learn it, test is next Monday! Talk about not wasting any time, huh? Oh well, what better way to get back into study mode than being forced to learn an entire system in a week? Do you think some of PA school is like an initiation process, kinda like a gang where you get beat up for awhile before they let you in or a frat with hell week? ;-)

Anyway, its too bad that derm is only a week. Not just because I have no idea how I am going to learn this stuff in a week, but because the prof that is teaching this module is awesome! We don't get to have him teach us often because of his heavy involvement in the AAPA, and it sucks because he is a great guy and teacher. Oh well, I guess that's life right?

Until next time, hang in there, keep pushing forward and doing your best, that's all anyone can ask of you.

M-R