I just graduated from medical school, and my new hospital has some very strange rules

You probably think you know where this is going. You don’t.<br><br>I was so proud when I matched with St. Francis, a hospital about an hour outside of Chicago. I make significantly more than my friends who matched at other hospitals around the country, and they certainly don’t have the perks we do. Free dorm room, free dining room that always has great food, free gym and gym classes, and a free parking garage. We even get 10 meals a week to use at the hospital’s restaurants, like sandwich shops and actual nice dining rooms. <br><br>Now the downsides. The hospital is enormous. I need to keep Google Maps pulled up on my phone even after completing my week of training just to find everything. I often get calls about patients on wings I haven’t even seen, and it takes me a while just to find the room.<br><br>And it is not possible for a resident to get any sleep outside of work. The hospital is very big on making sure our patients are happy, and they know how tired we are. So they demand that we hang out with our patients, talk with them, visit them. The patients complain about the night shifts being too busy to do this, but in the days, things are much calmer, and we aren’t anywhere near as busy. So one to two hours of my day is spent talking to patients and making them happy or doing little tasks they want done.<br><br>This is why it took me two weeks to explore the hospital. I walked through every wing, looked into every room (most were offices with secretaries in them). I even figured out how all the elevators worked. At St. Francis, there are two sets of elevators. All of them go to floors 1, 2, and 3. All of the staff elevators are labeled with a big blue “S”. The “S” elevators also go to floor 0, which is where the dorms, dining room, parking garages, and various gyms and medical supply stores are located.<br><br>Also, inevitably, one of the “S” elevators will only go to floor 4. The other staff elevators will only go to floors 1, 2, 3, and 0. However, one staff elevator goes to all five floors. None of the patient elevators go to floor 4. The staff elevators are secretly coded to only work for hospital employees. <br><br>I didn’t know any of this when I first moved in, and I thought the elevator wouldn’t work for me because I hadn’t yet registered my ID. I went to the front desk, confused, and the receptionist explained not all of the staff elevators go all the way to 4. She pointed me in the direction of the elevator, and I rode it all the way up to the top.<br><br>Floor 4 is where we see the patients. The emergency department, the operating rooms, the clinics, everything is located on floor 4. The hospital is built in a very steep hill, so the front of the hospital is only two floors high (basically a two floor building with a very high roof in the front), and the back is a four story building. We see patients on floor 4, stay in the dorms on floor 0, and file paperwork on 2 and part of 3.<br><br>I thought it was kind of strange, but the woman at the front desk assured me after five years, I would be glad we have so many elevators that only employees could use. She was right. The patients clog up the elevators during the day, but none of them take the blue elevators that say “S” on them, so they are always quick and easy to use. When we call an elevator, both a regular one and an “S” one almost always show up, and we can leave the patients in the regular one.<br><br>I spent the past week and a half exploring the hospital. Floor 1 is where we operate and use various scanners, so it’s the OR and radiology department. It has an ambulance bay with a huge emergency department that is much more calm and quiet than one would expect. We have a very large ICU with many nurses, so we are able to give our critical patients the best possible care. Nurses complain about being overstaffed, so they are probably right.<br><br>Floor 2 is where we do all the testing. It’s our lab and pathology department, and I spend a lot of time down here. It’s the only floor that is larger than floor 4, where the patients are. I’ve never seen such a huge lab in my life, and I have no doubt in my mind that it rivials the labs at some of the best hospitals in the world. The residents who are going into Pathology are the luckiest people in the world because they get to use the most advanced technology I have ever seen to do their work. We call floor 2 the lab, and it is truly the best place in the hospital.<br><br>Almost all of floor 3 is offices. The hospital’s larger departments have their offices sprinkled throughout the hospital, but this is where the smaller departments are. Anesthesiology, Dermatology, Ophthalmology, Psychiatry, etc. Floor 3 is also where pharmacology and interventional radiology are located. We also have a massive library and a huge conference room. The hospital holds presentations, which we call Grand Rounds, every night at 4:00. We are required to attend, and almost every senior resident has a presentation they give at least once a month. <br><br>Fourth and fifth year residents almost exclusively give the lectures. First, second, and third year residents do not give presentations, but we have been repeatedly told we will have to start giving presentations as fourth years. We have to give a topic for our presentation a month in advance, and the residents doing the presentations spend a great deal of time making their PowerPoints and practicing their talks.<br><br>The Grand Rounds are excellent, professional presentations that cover a wide variety of topics. I think the ones about parasites and various diseases in other countries are the most interesting. I don’t see myself ever leaving the United States again, and I don’t see myself taking a job in an underserved area like a reservation or a migrant camp. So the presentations on how to recognize different things you would catch abroad or in areas with significant poverty are kind of lost on me, but they are interesting nonetheless. <br><br>Floor 3 is the best place to wander around if you want to run into important people. I’ve seen the president of the hospital a few times when wandering around floor 3. I once saw the head of our department, who I greatly admired, and she was so nice to me. I ran into one of my former professors from medical school, who is now the chair of the department here, and he was my mentor for cell biology/cell physiology. He was one of the reasons I decided on a career in medicine, so it has been a dream come true to work with him for the last four years, and I was thrilled to see him here. He is one of the people who helped me match with St Francis, and he gives the Grand Rounds presentation about once a month.<br><br>Part of floor 3 is now the gift shop, book store, and a small mall. The hospital has a Barnes & Noble, a Nordstrom, a Target, and a few restaurants inside of it. We have a subway tunnel to the local airport, so it is often used as a place to shop while waiting for flights.<br><br>So the hospital is fantastic. I am so excited to be here. I love my job, the hospital is amazing, my cell biology/cell physiology mentor is here and gives the Grand Rounds about once a month, what more could a girl ask for?<br><br>There are just a few strange things. The first I saw while exploring floor 1. The very end of the east wing is locked behind a fence and the door is padlocked. We talked about it during our orientation, but no one apparently knows any more than that. There is a blood bank behind the locked part of the wing, but apparently we can’t go in because it is “not for the faint of heart.”<br><br>The second thing is that water is not allowed almost anywhere. Our water cooler on the resident floor and the water fountains in the dining room have all been disabled. There is a sign in the dining room that says “Do not drink and drive.” It lists a bunch of behaviors that are considered drunk driving, and they include operating heavy machinery or walking, even if you are only a little bit buzzed. It explicitly says not to drink water.<br><br>There is a huge list of things we aren’t allowed in the cafeteria. Water is one of them, obviously, but so are a lot of foods. We may not eat melons, berries, or any fruit that is typically red. An exception is tomatoes, but apparently we can’t eat them raw. We cannot eat pomegranates, but pomegranate juice is okay so long as it doesn’t have real juice in it (so basically all of it). We can’t eat anything with raw milk or raw eggs in it. So we can’t eat soft boiled or fried eggs, or raw unbaked cookie dough, but scrambled or baked eggs and baked cookie dough is okay. There was a long list of foods we weren’t allowed to have, and I thought it was just to protect our health in case we had allergies or intolerances or sensitivities, but when I asked my senior residents about it, they were totally shocked.<br><br>“What’s wrong with water?” One of them asked.<br><br>“Can we not eat raw eggs and soft-boiled eggs?” Another asked. “What kind of bullshit is this?”<br><br>None of the lists were new, and they had never seen them before. Apparently, we had been allowed to drink water and eat these foods before, and no one knew