With internal medicine, I got lucky and ended up starting on a general hospitalist medicine rotation at our community hospital sites. So that was really kind of bread and butter. A lot of the things you can counter to medical school working with CLPD patients, patients with some pneumonia, patients with cellulitis, things like that. And just kind of just diving right in. 

They gave me a lot of autonomy early on, which I think just depends on your rotation.  I was really able to dive right in and start coming up with my own treatment plans, workups, and working with patients directly as their primary provider.  My senior resident and attending were supervising and letting me do my own thing, which is awesome. So yeah, it kind of depends on what you're doing and what rotation you end up getting started on, but I got lucky and was able to dive right in.

Yeah, definitely being careful and taking COVID precautions, but probably the biggest shift has actually has been the lack of visitors in the hospital. So I just came off of a rotation with a specialized new cancer diagnosis as service. And it required a lot of communication with the family, especially if the patient you're working with is a little bit older. It definitely has family involved in their care. So that was the big shift for me that I noticed where it was just really difficult to have to talk to the patients over the talk with the families over the phone and just many, many more conversations and some miscommunications that happened because of that. So that's kind of how coronavirus has really affected me.

So definitely very exciting to be a doctor putting in those orders for Tylenol, for lidocaine patches, simple stuff. You feel good doing that. And then I think one great aspect of our program is the nurses respect you right off the bat. They understand your learning, but they still put a lot of effort into trying to make you feel like a doctor. 

They respect you. They, they might ask you questions to clarify certain things, but you can definitely tell that there's a lot of respect. I think that goes both ways. So it's been a great place to work and it's been exciting to be part of that be a part of working a patient up and helping them get treated and helping them get out of the hospital in a better spot than they were when they came in.

As an intern, I think it's very important to have a good attitude. There's a lot to learn, so you have to understand not be taken aback when you're given feedback about the things that you should really be getting better at and take that to heart and also just kind of stay organized. 

You'll be getting a lot of different feedback. So be able to figure out which ones are most important, which ones you need to work on first. And just in general, prioritizing things both with how to improve as well as your patient care. And you'll kind of pick things up as you go. But you only have so much time only have so much energy. So you really have to figure out what's important and do those things.

After intern year is done, you're kind of the person that the interns start looking up to. And that's coming very quickly.  I am thinking about what else I need to get better at right now to prepare for that transition. I have been spending my time trying to get a good, solid understanding of how the hospital system works. Trying to get a solid understanding of what I need to do, what I need to prioritize, what to do when a patient comes in and how to get them out of the hospital in a better place.

And a lot of those things you don't learn in medical school, all those things are about coordinating with social work, coordinating with outpatient referrals home health care, those kinds of things. And you don't really think about it when you're a medical school, just learning about what disease is like in the textbook.

Talk to those that are just one step ahead of you, or a couple of steps ahead of you see what they experienced. It's medicine, there's so many opportunities, so many different paths that people are taking that you really don't know much until you get there. So you have to try your best to explore and find out what works really well for you. Once you find that you'll work really hard and that's what it takes to be successful. You have to find your passion and that's why it's really going to drive you to be the best and be the best that you can be.