Oops, another unexpected hiatus! Vacation and a new job will do that to a girl. I would recap on my trip home to Michigan but honestly I don’t want to because it will make me miss it too much. It’s always great to see my friends and fam but it’s also a painful reminder that I live 1500+ miles away from them. Not to mention it was perfect fall weather the entire time I was in town.. makes me hate Florida right now.

Anyway, what I do want to recap on is my first week of work!

If you weren’t already aware, I accepted my first full-time, big girl job as Clinical Dietitian in a mid-size hospital. In hospitals, dietitians are consulted by doctors or nurses to see patients that may be at risk regarding their nutrition. For example, say at admission a patient has recent unintentional weight loss or loss of appetite, we get consulted. There are a lot of reasons for consults and with the high in-and-out traffic within the hospital setting, we get a lot of these each day. Tube feedings are always reason for a consult. We also do diet education for newly diagnosed patients (i.e. diabetes, kidney failure). And of course, all of the patients we see we follow-up with anywhere from 1 to 10 days later depending on the severity of their risk. So that’s pretty much what makes up our workload for the day, new consults and follow-ups.

I am one of three dietitians in the hospital. Well three and then my boss, who’s also a dietitian but he only sees a few patients per day since he mostly does manager-type stuff. He’s awesome. Really nice, completely laid back, and likes Chevelle so he’s totally alright in my book.

My days go a little something like this: get to work and screen my floors to see what patients I’ll be focusing on that day. Once I have my list of patients for the day, I start to scour the electronic medical record system for information on my patients. You want to know what you’re walking into before going up to see the patient. Sometimes this is easy, other times the nurses don’t do a great job of inputting the patient info so you have to play detective. After I get all of the necessary info, I head up to the floors and pay each patient a visit. Sometimes, depending on their medical status, you can’t actually speak with the patient so there’s also a lot of contact with the nurses and nurse techs, and the doctors too if you can find them. I haven’t yet established myself with any of the nurses or docs so right now it’s a little difficult for me, but once I’m there a while and people start learning who I am it will be easier. Right now I’m more worried about learning the computer systems and charting styles.

After going up to the floors, once I’m able to escape (sometimes a patient is lonely and just need someone to talk to, and hey I’m okay with that) I head back down to the office and sit myself in front of the computer to chart, chart, chart. If you’ve ever worked in a patient-care setting, you know that it’s all about documentation. This part can be a bit tedious, monotonous and boring so I try to get up every 30 minutes to refill my water, walk to the far-away bathroom (that’s nicer and cleaner anyway) or just do something that doesn’t involve looking at a screen. This basically takes up the whole afternoon, unless a new consult from a doctor comes through that needs to be seen that day.

Overall, my first week was good! I didn’t stress too much, just tried to soak in everything I could and get comfortable finding my way around. For the time-being, I’m assigned to the telemetry units so that I can get a good grip on clinical nutrition before being shoved into the ICU or something crazy. Telemetry patients are there to be consistently monitored, so the spectrum of reasons for admission is pretty big, but there are a lot of cardiac patients (stroke, heart attack, etc). If you remember from back in my clinical rotation, I loved cardiac the most out of all units in the hospital so this is actually a pretty good setup for me.

I’ve always been told that getting experience with clinical nutrition is important to build your base of knowledge of disease states, so I knew inevitably that I’d work in a hospital at some point. But to be completely honest, I never wanted to work in a hospital. It’s hard to see patients and become so involved in their care, and then sometimes never have a follow-up with them because they discharged the very next day. There’s no relationship built with the patients, and that’s what I want. You all know how much I loved working at the eating disorder treatment center. Working one-on-one with them through their journey to recovery, unfortunately the timing wasn’t right for me to come in full-time. But as much as this clinical position itself isn’t ideal, I actually like my new job. Maybe it’s because I like my co-workers and my boss, or because I’m so fortunate to even have a job like this right out of my internship, but I’m pleasantly surprised at how much I’m enjoying it. I’m sure some days I’ll hate it, but isn’t that the case with any job? For now, it’s the best thing I could possibly be doing for my future.

Did you/do you like your first real job?

Be honest, don’t I look so good in that lab coat? Jealous?