Wayfaring MD
And for the 5,000th time, let me clarify that I am female.
Disclaimer:
HIPAA is for reals, folks. All of my "patient stories" have been changed to protect patient privacy. I will change any or all identifiers, including age, location, race/ethnicity, sex, medical history, and quotes.
When 2 followers message you and ask “what the heck is a G6?”
My bad guys. Lemme explain.
OB docs like to shorten absolutely everything. They have a system for abbreviating a woman’s whole pregnancy history. It’s called the GPAT system. G is Gravida, meaning total number of pregnancies. P is para, meaning number of live children the woman has. A is abortus, for number of pregnancies that did not result in a live birth. T is for term, for number of pregnancies that went to a full term delivery. You can learn a lot from a woman’s Gs and Ps.
Let’s practice, shall we? My mother is a G4P2A2T2. She’s been pregnant 4 times, had 2 babies (both of which were term deliveries), and 2 miscarriages. If the Ps and As don’t add up to the Gs, the patient is pregnant, as in G5P3A1. Or If the Ps +As are greater than the Gs, the patient had a multiple birth, as in G3P4A0.
To confuse things even more, we can abbreviate the Gs and Ps to just a G with numbers, so my mother would be a G4222.
Make sense?
In our OB rounds, we’d open with a short statement about each patient from which you could gather a ton of information. It went a little like this:
This is a 27 year old G4P3A1 at 37 and 4 POD #1 s/p C/S. She is +/immune/NR, desires a circ. Breast and bottle. Depo.
To translate: This 27 year old girl has had 4 pregnancies, 3 kids, and 1 abortion. She is at 37 weeks, 4 days gestation. Today is post-op day 1 after a C-Section. Her Rh type is positive, she’s rubella immune, and her RPR test for syphillis was non-reactive. She desires a circumcision for the baby. She will breast and bottle feed and will be using depo shots for birth control.
Now you see why we abbreviate.
Reblogging for future reference. My hands are larger than the average human, so the whole fingertip/2 fingers/3 fingers etc method is sort of lost on me. I always guess smaller than it actually is. So the visual aids here may be helpful for me.
(via missmdisme)
Just a taste of what my mornings are like: here’s our seating chart for morning rounds. The OB folks are very particular about who sits where, and fortunately a 4th year warned me and my friend Ashley about it before we started last week, so we knew to head as far to the back as we could. I think I did a pretty good job with the dimensions and shape of the room, but I don’t think you can adequately tell how cramped it is in there. This diagram shows 23 people, but we’ve made it up to 27. Yesterday all us students decided to just sit on the floor because there was more room that way than trying to fit chairs in there. I wanted to take a picture of us, but that would surely be frowned upon. By the way, the chair quality decreases as you move toward the back of the room. The attendings and residents sit in upholstered chairs and the chief resident sits in a desk chair. The small chairs are little stackable hard plastic ones, and of course the floor is the floor. Heh. Gotta love that hierarchy system.
