The Crazies

It's not like Greys Anatomy...in fact at the moment it couldn’t be further from the truth.
I mean on any given day, my life is not half as glamorous or drama filled as those Seattle Grace Interns make it out to be (though sometimes in my little brain I like to imagine that it actually is). Currently it is so lacking in any kind of stimulation I was actually excited to have a Friday night call in Cape Town gangster central!!!

So now I’ve piqued your curiosity… I mean what could be so awful about work at the moment that I look forward to inevitably busy calls.One word… Psychiatry.
I retract any previous statements that I may have made on the cushiest speciality you can go into. If you want minimal patient contact without committing yourself to a lab for life or if the phrase pulseless electrical activity strikes fear in your heart; if you lack diagnosis confidence and want to be able to change it 5 or 10 years down the line, if frequent coffee breaks are necessary in your hours, if you want access to the strong stuff and if you’re in it for the money then look no further. Forget about Dermatology!* It’s actually quite hard trying to distinguish between a macular-papular rash of benign inconsequence and a similarly looking one that comes just before multi organ failure. At the same time I’ve spent a week doing jimmy* in their wards and a Stevens Johnsons syndrome can keep you busy for days before they die.
Also scratch off your list Ophthalmology*** where every now and then there will be a foreign body that will need extraction, you occasionally need to scrub up for theatre and sometimes topical antibiotics don’t work.
Now I can hear all of you muggles (that be the non medics) already…no. I don’t get to work with the psychopaths and those partial to human liver on toast. If my job was like Greys Anatomy then yes…it would be worth dedicating a string of episodes to the crazy. Sadly for my Dad and his hard earned money, 2 years of BSc, 6 years of MBChB and my days have been reduced to wandering the grounds of Valkenburg (very much like some of the chronic patients do) in search of an unsuspecting, but usually paranoid schizophrenics to do a mental status examination on. On a hectic day there may even be one or two fresh ones to clerk and on the rare occasion there may even be someone who needs blood drawn or (very difficult I know) a CT scan form!!!Sigh…I feel like I have been made an involuntary admission...

*Skin-ology for the muggles
**the mind numbing yet refreshingly hands on everyday ward work real interns do…namely dripping, bleeding, bagging and labelling, form filling, pharmacy fighting, fingerprinting etc…(please refer to previous notes)
***Eye-ology