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A typical day

Mornings are consults: other doctors have patients with fevers nobody can explain, infections that are not responding, or cultures growing something odd. You read the chart, examine the patient, ask the questions everyone else skipped, and then look at the laboratory results yourself. Afternoons bring clinic patients on long-term antibiotics, a stewardship meeting about an antibiotic the hospital is using too freely, and the microbiology lab, where you look at plates and slides with the technologists. You spend more time reading and thinking than almost any other doctor in the building.