What we have here is a failure to communicate...

Nothing is ever simple on this rotation.  Thanks to another communication foul-up between the course administration and the residents, the residents thought that the students were supposed to work tomorrow (our test day for the clerkship).  Apparently the residents have been hassled before for letting the students out too early before the test, and so they didn't want to get in trouble and didn't want to get us in trouble either.  However, getting up at 3:30 to work at 4:30 on the day of a major exam (which starts at 10:15) generally doesn't do much for reasoning capacity or resulting grades.  After much confusion and some consultations (one of which involved our no-nonsense AI telling us that under no circumstances were we to come in tomorrow morning or she'd phone the dean about duty hour violations), we finally had to end up talking (well, actually, my more courageous classmate did the talking, I just stood there and nodded occasionally) to the incredibly nice, helpful, student-friendly PGY-3 who had originally brought this up (it should be emphasized, however, that it was NOT her idea) to tell her that per the course director we wouldn't be coming in for rounds.  She took it really well, but it didn't stop either of us from feeling bad.  On the other hand, as the AI pointed out, we would feel a lot worse if we ended up failing the exam 2/2 sleep deprivation.  Again, I don't think there's any blame to be placed here except on a flawed communication system; the residents here (particularly the PGY-3 I mentioned) have been nothing short of outstanding (and I can say this despite my significant differences of opinion with them on major moral issues).  Anyway, we'll see how this works out.  Otherwise, it was a pretty slow day.  There were only 3 OR cases and a limited amount of floor work that we could help out with, and after sitting down with us and essentially going through the highlights of "things you need to know for an Ob-Gyn test" (interestingly, neither abortion nor contraception came up during the discussion...food for thought) our PGY-3 sent us home.

So that's that...the final hurdle will be this exam, which I hear is rather tricky.  We'll see how it goes.  Prayers would be appreciated; I'd really like to be done with this clerkship forever.  Anyway, I'm gonna go study for a while; back tomorrow (hopefully) to wrap things up for this clerkship.  Till then, peace and God bless!