Читать книгу A Medical Liaison - Шэрон Кендрик, Sharon Kendrick - Страница 12

IT WAS her first full day as a working doctor and she was mentally and physically unprepared for the sheer hard work, the relentless pace of it, and the demands. As a student she had done a ‘shadow’—tailing the house officer for four weeks, to give her a taste of the job. But this time she was on her own. True, she had her SHO, her registrar, and ultimately her consultant to call upon, but she had been taught as a medical student not to abuse the back-up system. They each had a heavy work-load—she must get on as best she could, save in a real emergency where she felt unable to cope.

Magda Maguire had pointed out the geography of the ward, and then taken her to each patient, where Louisa had quickly written down their name and initial diagnosis, intending to bone up on them that evening so that she was fairly well acquainted with them in time for tomorrow’s ward round.

Then she returned to Dale and did the same there, and Mandy Patterson made her a cup of coffee for which Louisa was extremely grateful, but she had no chance to drink more than a couple of mouthfuls, and by the time she returned it had formed a thick skin and had to be thrown away.

And in between trying to learn all about forty new patients and their illnesses, she was having to deal with some of the problems which had arisen overnight, and non-urgent problems from the preceding weekend. One patient had developed a livid red rash after being commenced on a new drug treatment. Another’s intravenous infusion had ‘tissued’—the cannula had slipped out of the vein into the surrounding tissue—and it took Louisa ages to resite, partly because she was not yet very practised at it, but the sound of Magda Maguire clicking her tongue impatiently beside her did little to improve her confidence.