Good morning!
It’s been a whirlwind of a week over here. As you know, this week marked the start of my second dietetic internship (my first internship was last summer in NC)! I’ll be spending the summer interning with the dietitians at a large inner-city hospital in D.C. Hospital (clinical) dietitians meet with patients to assess their nutritional status and risk for malnutrition or other issues, write/recommend patient diet orders (including calculating needs for tube feedings, IV feedings, and supplements, if necessary), give brief diet educations if necessary, etc. It’s very different from outpatient work in that you only spend maybe 5 to 10 minutes with each patient – 15 minutes tops if you’re doing a diet education (for example, information on a diabetic diet), and of course in that all the patients are sick and in hospital beds.
It’s been an interesting experience so far and one that I’ve been enjoying more than I thought I would! There’s a pretty steep learning curve with all the crazy medical abbreviations and medications (not to mention the fact that I’ve determined it must be a requirement that to get into med school you must have TERRIBLE handwriting), but so far so good. I jumped right in – after orientation on Monday, I spent Tuesday morning shadowing/learning from the male RD at the hospital, who is a great teacher and doesn’t make me feel dumb when I ask questions, which is so important. By 11 a.m. I saw my first patient on my own and wrote up the whole clinical note for the patient to include in their medical record! As of yesterday I was up to seeing 4 patients on my own and doing their charts. Yay! It’s also cool because we’re sharing the same space on the patient floors with all the physicians. I wear a white lab coat that makes me look all official and important (even though my name badge says “volunteer” instead of dietetic intern… not exactly impressive sounding), and they even gave me a pager to carry around! Apparently it’s 1999 again.
Awkward blurry bathroom self portrait – please note the pockets stuffed to the brim with cheat sheets, pens, calculator, and pager!
My hours at the hospital may change a bit depending which dietitian I’m working with (I’ll be rotating around through a bunch of the different hospital floors), but as for this week I’ve been on a 7 a.m. to 3 or 3:30 p.m. schedule. Minus the 5:30 a.m. wake up call, I actually kind of like it – even though I’m still working a full 8 hour day, it for some reason makes the day seem really short to get out so early.
Since I’ve been getting to work so early in the morning, I’ve been rocking the evening workouts all week. On Monday and Wednesday nights I hit our apartment gym, last night I went for a 4.5 mile run with my friend Ashley, and on Tuesday night I joined the Lululemon Georgetown run group again!
It’s been so rainy here all week, but luckily we had a break in the storms. 
Like last week, we started the workout with a little mini-boot camp courtesy of Chris from Crossfit Dupont!
Squats are less painful when you have such a beautiful view of the water.
Then we set out for the run! We ran over towards Lincoln…
Across the river to Virginia and along the trail on the water…
And back up through Rosslyn to Georgetown for a total of almost 4 miles. We got rained on a little bit but it was refreshing. Can’t wait for next week – feel free to join us! Every Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. at the Georgetown Lululemon store.
After the workout, Heather and I headed over to Sweetgreen for dinner. My fave!
I had a massive salad of mixed greens, spinach, quinoa, beets, avocado, sweet potato, carrots, tofu, sprouts, and spicy broccoli. Delicious, as always!
It was a great night.
Off to the hospital – hooray for FRIDAY! Matt has been on a business trip all week and gets back tonight; we’re staying in town this weekend and it’s going to be amazing not to travel. I’m pretty exhausted and can’t wait for a long, relaxing holiday weekend! Our apartment pool opens tomorrow – woohoo!
Happy Friday – have a great weekend! Anyone have any fun Memorial Day plans? Beach trips?