Mini victories

Today I saw a few more patients on my own at first. One guy I was particularly excited about because he came in with a growth on his toe. It was a wart! There is something immensely satisfying about being able to reach a diagnosis and have a treatment plan ready to recommend. Most of the time when I went in the room, I wasn't sure what was going on and wanted to double check with the Doc, to see what they think, but this time I actually knew what I was doing. Obviously, it's still early on, so the MD comes in afterward anyway and goes through everything to make sure I haven't missed something and performs the necessary procedures, but soon enough I hope to get to be doing that stuff myself.
It's funny that when I'm shadowing, I'm thinking "yeah I could totally do this" and then when it's just me in the room I'm nervous and forgetting the basics. Hopefully that will go away with time and experience.
Something else interesting has been the number of kids with ADHD and other behavioral problems that are on medications. It concerns me to mess with their brain chemistry from such young ages by having them on drugs. I guess I can't always tell from a brief session what their needs are in different settings like the home and school.
More mini victories ensue when I could tell what a drug is that the NP didn't recognize. That sort of thing doesn't happen often. Most of the time I'm clueless when I hear the MDs throw around a medication name because we didn't learn all of the brand names for drugs in pharmacology. Even when they tell me what class of medication it is - I feel like I'm still fumbling around, wracking my brain to find what it is associated with - the side effects and that sort of thing. I suppose that's normal since it's so early on in the year, by the end hopefully I'll have more of it down. Even then I won't know everything. It's a constant learning process.