My First Day, aka How to Rescue a Dummy

Yup.

Folks, I am back at school and just finished my first day of orientation!

I had the normal apprehensions (would I make any friends? what if no one likes me? do I really want to be a doctor?), but things turned out alright. The 100+ students were sorted into academies, so meeting other people became a 40-person ordeal, rather than a 120-person disaster. I've always found it really awkward going up to people and introducing myself out of the blue, and it was even more awkward today, as many of the students already knew each other.

Thankfully, however, I was not a total hermit.

Other than the usual tours and introductions, our first day also consisted of Basic Life Support training. Enter Fei's fears about being a good doctor.

We watched a movie and then broke up into groups to practice our resuscitation skills on a family of dummies (daddy dummy, sister dummy, and infant dummy). Everyone got a chance to do chest compressions, open airways, and use the AED.

I am now certified to do CPR and the Heimlich maneuver, but the only thing I truly feel prepared to do is breathe down a dummy's throat and then count to 30. For 2 minutes. 

Oh, and smack a baby really, really hard on the back.

Perhaps I would be able to perform these procedures on a human. But only if your sternum clicks every time I push your chest down, and only if your shoulder lights up to tell me that I am indeed pushing down hard enough to elevate your blood pressure (100 pounds of pressure is hard work!).

Anyone need CPR?

But in all seriousness, I wonder if this is the only type of practice we will ever get in medical school. Which raises the question: when are we actually going to have enough practice so that we are decent enough to see patients? Or do we practice what we learn on dummies on actual patients?