This is my last week of Family Medicine, only a couple more days. Thursday is my Family Medicine COMAT exam, so hopefully I'm ready for it - I've been listening to prep lectures. Yesterday we went to a nursing home for my preceptor to catch up on his nursing home patients. It was interesting, though mostly depressing. A good number of the patients are unaware of things, and most have those childlike empty grins of Alzheimers, the nonverbal combativeness of Alzheimers, slow fogginess of normal dementia, shaking and mental confusion of Parkinson's, or if they're lucky a semi-lucid awareness of what is going on. One lady/man (I couldn't tell what gender the patient was, to be quite honest) kept following us down the corridors in his/her wheelchair, calling after the doctor who examined his/her friend asking why we didn't examine him/her. He/she kept grabbing my arm and trying to talk to me, but the person was partly deaf so it was hard to even talk to him/her. The doctor and the chief nurse tried ignoring the person, but he/she was very persistent. Eventually they talked the person down, but it was awkward for a little while there. We also saw one lady who has a big fall risk who feels trapped at the nursing home, because she cannot go out unaccompanied and has no family nearby. That was rather depressing also.
I start Infectious Disease at Fairfield next week, so that should be neat. I checked my rotation schedule again and my second elective is still not arranged, so I re-emailed our coordinator and I guess she just hadn't noticed that I had attached two different forms when I emailed her a month or so ago, and so she tried to blame the IT department on it. She better not cost me a rotation...it'll be a big headache to have to find another place.
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