Back to the grind

Vacation time is over, hurts to say it, but it's true. My flight was at 2:15 PM yesterday, but sadly it got delayed until about 6:30 PM so that wasn't cool. I kept busy though playing chess at this really sweet restaurant at Pearson airport that had ipads at each seat where you would order from, pretty snazzy. I actually almost missed my flight because of it!

I tried to rotate this picture but technology said no.

Anyway, finally made it into New york around 8pm, I was both happy and sad to be back. Now that i think about it, mostly excited, I miss this place! Forgot how lively it is compared to my house out in the sticks back home. 

Today was my first day on my psych rotation! The best way to describe it is probably....entertaining. The morning was mostly an orientation which consisted of tours and a main take home point of "don't get cornered". After orientation we all went to our respective assigned floors/services. My floor is a general adult psych ward which happens to be the main teaching floor for the residents, which means that this is where most of the interesting cases end up, and boy did i get a little taste of that today...

The day was slowing down but the resident still had a few patients left to see, and she invited me to tag along and observe for the first day. The little med student in me was happy to do so. We walked into a room, pretty bland, but rather large with 2 single beds inside. There was a large lady laying in bed half asleep looking a little disheveled. For the sake of confidentiality lets call her Maurice. 

We asked Maurice if we could speak with her in the conference room and she was surprisingly really happy to do so. As she got out of bed I immediately got the sense that something was a little off with her. She walked like a zombie, eyes half shut staring off into the distance, she dragged her feet until we finally got to our destination. The interview started pretty damn good actually, she was really polite and almost acted like a little kid. At some magic moment in time, her attitude completely changed, she became hostile and super aggressive. She would repeat what we would say in a mocking manner, she acted as if our simple question of "were you ever admitted to another hospital before?" was somehow an attack on her intelligence.. she made it clear to us that she was the smartest person in the room and that she knows how to survive without selling her body. She then looked at my resident and said "i bet you sell your body", it made things a little uncomfortable because she kept staring my resident insinuating that she was a hooker for a good 5 minutes... 

She was an incredibly delicate and difficult patient. I thought maybe if we could speak to a family member it would help us figure out what the hell her story was because she was not willing to tell us much of anything, "figure it out yourself, you don't really care about me" she would keep telling us. Ultimately, she did give us her mothers number, i dialed it hoping to get some much needed info, but of course she made that number up completely... surprise surprise. We made little progress with her today, but she is now my first psych patient, i'll see if I can make better progress tomorrow.