So, I have had almost 17 full weeks of patient care. Of being able to dilate without getting my attending's permission. Of having to come up with my own diagnoses and treatment plans... well sort of.
This semester is taking a lot out of me. I know that I don't know everything, and that's ok, that's why we call it practice... j/k. Anyway today was rough for me, I feel like one of my two attendings has to find something wrong with my exam, the other I feel as if I should be a walking book (and I don't know everything! - some things I haven't seen before so how am I supposed to recognize it and/or I can't possibly think of every differential but the ones I do think of are relevant - that's why I'm here... to learn how to recognize something when I see it in clinic because let me tell you: patients are not textbook, they come in looking like something else and not like the classic case we always talk about in clinic, so how am I supposed to recognize it!?)
I just feel a bit deflated and defeated after my wednesday's in clinic. The other thing is that I don't always agree with the attending, but when I try to voice my opinion that I don't think it is what they think it is, I feel a bit swept to the side and what they say goes, but I don't always get a good reason for why they are doing what they are doing. (this is not just today - more of a general opinion than any specific case) I think part of that is due to the fact that we are pressed for time, that patients come in 20 or more minutes late and we are still expected to have them finished in time for the next pt that happened to come in 15 minutes early... It always inevitably happens that way, then we are rushed, our attending is rushed, and we have to talk about our plan very briefly and what the attending says goes, if you are stumbling in trying to make your opinion known, well you don't have one and then you can get dinged on your grade for the pt encounter for not knowing/creating a plan, etc.
Maybe none of this is true, maybe I'm just seeing what I want to see. Who knows. All I know is that I will be relieved when I get to leave school in January and be in the "real world" almost completely relying on my own knowledge and experience to tell me what to do. I'm going to stumble and I'm going to fall down, but I should be able to and not made to feel bad when I do. It's like my attending said yesterday about the difference between how we are taught and how ophthalmologists are taught. We are taught that everything has to be perfect and that if we overminus by 0.25D then the pt is going to die (exaggeration- sarcasm doesn't come through the written word as well as it does with the spoken word), and ophthalmologists are taught to be fearless and that it is ok to make a mistake because everyone does it and they have more on the line and at risk than we do. I would love to see more optometry schools and professors and attendings give us the opportunity to fall and to fail and to make mistakes, to allow us the time to make mistakes.
I guess that is my ramble for the evening. I need to get some sleep before my long day in peds tomorrow... yay. Eyeball school is ahead and winning (UABSO:10 - Me:1).
