Tooling around

The most obnoxious thing about being an intern is carrying a ridiculous amount of office supplies with you. On a daily basis this is what I must schlepp with me from room to room when pre-rounding and rounding all day.

1.) A stethoscope (obviously.)
2.) Black pens. These MUST be black if you deal with paper charts.
3.) Multi colored pens (to eliminate the confusion of the ADD-ness of this profession when you're pulled in fifteen different directions as you're trying to place orders, draw blood, talk to a family, and write a discharge simultaneously.)
4.) Maxwell's (pocket sized handbook of random equations and lab values)
5.) A Maxwell's knockoff of the hospital's preferred regulations on how to calculate things like TPN (total parenteral nutrition... for the nonmedicals I won't get too much into it, but basically how to calculate a form of nutrition that is provided through an IV)
5.) prescription pads
6.) a potpourri of passwords stored on a color coded piece of paper and always inconveniently inaccessible when one needs it most
7.) A reflex hammer, a pen light (I fail in this on a regular basis)
8.) Forms. For everything: meds, blood bank, labwork, nontraditional labwork, nontraditional meds only supplied by a random underground facility in the North Pole... you get the picture.
9.) a Phone
10.) a pager
11.) and last but certainly not least, meal cards.

I am convinced that one of the rites of passage of becoming a good intern is to be cool about carrying all this without fumbling and dropping half of the items in the process. However, to help you get there... these things are amazing:

They're called storage clipboards and this particular one is a Saunders Deskmate. Changed my life (and enhanced my nerd status dramatically, but at least it reduced the awkward fumbling).

Laters,

KidDoctor