Got our IDs and everything!

Woo-hoo! I'm sitting in the library on the fifth floor of the Braker building next to St. Barnabas Hospital's main building right now. But let's start at the beginning.

We did get up at around 7am this morning, got dressed (I decided to wear a shirt and tie after all .. was very tempted to wear scrubs on the first day) and left for the subway station a bit late. Phèdre was trailing a bit behind. Only when we were right in front of the hospital at about 8:50am did she ask "now what do we do, we are an hour early" and we could explain to her that we were actually supposed to be there at 9am, not 10. So we went up to the office of L. S., in front of which we found a pack of other medstudents, I'd say about fifteen, apparently also waiting. At about 9:10 it appeared that L. S. arrived and as soon as the conference room was clear for us to go in, we all took a seat. Felt great to be in these chairs with the little fold-out tables again, amidst a group of other students. They seemed a bit nervous though. Not quite sure why, the one I talked to said that apparently not all their rotations had been decided upon upfront. Anyway, there was L. S. referring to herself as "our mother" and to us as "her children" (sorry, mom!) for these coming weeks (our 60-day-rotation is "extra-long"). After quite a bit of introductory talk (especially to her German children .. heheh), L. had us fill out the usual forms, took a Polaroid picture of each one of us - and since it was almost 10am already, she had skriehma and me rush to Dr. G's office in the emergency department's administration, bypassing human resources where we would later have to get our hospital IDs.

So we left Phèdre to her destiny - I'm sure she'll tell you about it later, if she can - she was still alive and talking about one and a half hours ago anyway. We proceeded to our department and headed to the administration of the emergency department (ED from here on). Once there, the attending we had been in e-mail contact with so far, Dr. G., greeted us nicely and took us into his office for a thorough 2-hour-introductory orientation. We learned that we will cycle through shifts like everyone else - two weeks day, two weeks late and two weeks night shifts - we will of course not benefit from the two weeks off that usually follow this. We chose to start this week on day shifts, 7am-3pm, our first workday will be tomorrow. We also learned that we are entitled to five sick/personal days which we can take any day except Wednesdays. There is no excuse for not showing up on Wednesdays, since Wednesday is education day. Each week there's talks, discussions and seminars from 7am-12pm that we are required to attend. There will also be a quiz on a chapter from "the" Emergency Medicine Textbook - "Rosen's". These quizzes will be graded and be part of our final evaluation. As foreign students, we will not depend on these evaluations since Germany couldn't care less about how we do here - but we do want to portray a good image so I guess we'll have to read and study these 20 pages of chapter 115 until our first quiz the day after tomorrow. Dr. G. decided that we also have to work five shifts on any weekends. We arbitrarily picked some weekends and shifts for that. We are required to serve at least 10 shifts in the pediatric (from now on ped's) ER. Like any other student we will be evaluated by the residents and/or attendings who will be directly supervising us, we need to have a minimum of seven evaluations by October. We also have the option to replace one 8 hour shift with a 12 hour EMT ridealong. I am pretty sure I want to do that. But I'll get acquainted with the ER first.

We discussed several other things but I think I'm done boring you with them. Dr. G. then handed us off to one of his residents who gave us a tour of this hospital's pediatric and standard EDs, the trauma room as well as other frequently-needed hospital departments like radiology, the ICU, the lab and the pharmacy.

Right after that we went to get our hospital IDs at human resources, which surprisingly went without any of us ever needing any identification whatsoever. Saying your name seemed to be enough so far. And now we have pretty badges. Anyway we went to the cafeteria after that and tried out our shiny new "Meal privilege cards" that - believe it or not - gave us a free and tasty lunch at the cafeteria! Woo-hoo! Free food!

Incidentally some vendors had opened up shop in the cafeteria offering scrubs and other physician apparel. Since I was seriously low on scrubs, I bought three tops and two pairs of pants for 5$ each. An OK-price I guess. If we can manage to buy a lock somewhere, we could even be able to occupy one or two of the lockers in the ED. After lunch we tried to get our badges/keycards validated for the Braker building, where the library is, but apparently the security office only does that from 10am-12pm, 5-7pm or 1-3am. We'll wait for 5pm then - until then you can access the library freely anyway (otherwise I couldn't be writing in here :) ). So after lunch and the short stop at the security department we went back up to the ED and found Phèdre, who apparently was following the trauma team today, since her receiving surgeon was - who would have guessed - still in surgery. We'll see soon whether she ever got a chance to talk to him. From the ED we went here, where J. from the library front desk gave us a tour of this cozy place they have here, the number of books seems limited but the number of journals, reading rooms, computers and the audio-visual room seem adequate enough.

I think things will be great fun around here. People are very friendly and open up easily as I've come to expect from Americans. Even more so if they find out you're not American. I think we're going to have a great time.