By today, 10/10/2008,  I have witnessed four people left the team, since I came on board in July 2007.  This represents over 66% turnover rate in one year.  Two of them were with research for less than one year, the other for two years, the last the longest one.  To be sure, it is the company’s loss seeing such a high turnover rate.

The other 50% of time is spent happily on extrapolating medical data from source documents.  For me this is the easy and fun part of the job, not as tasking and stressful as dealing with people.  The medical documents include:
CBC lab report
Biochemistry lab report
echocardiogram
immunohistology report
hospital discharge summary
surgical pathologist report
biopsy report
surgery report
MRI report
CT/PET report
X-ray report
body bone scan report
radiation report
physician order
physician progress note
physician consultation summary
New patient medical history questionnaire
Cancer drug pathway report
nursing note
medication pink sheet
drug administration blue sheet
Reference used daily:
AJCC: Cancer Staging Handbook
Mosby’s Drug Guide
Elsevier’s Oncology Drugs & Regimens
Tortora’s Principles of Human Anatomy
An English-Chinese Dictionary of Medicine
Clinical Trial protocols, etc…

Online references that I use daily include:
http://www.fda.gov/cder/cancer/oncrefto.htm — oncology tools
http://www.labtestsonline.org  — understanding lab results
http://www.medscape.com/medscapetoday  — medscape
http://www.druglib.com  — for drug information
http://www.clinicalpharmacology-ip.com/Default.aspx  — clinical pharmacy
http://seer.cancer.gov/resources   — SEER
http://medical.merriam-webster.com/medical  — online medical dictionary
http://www.cap.org/apps/cap.portal  — American Pathology
http://www.globalrph.com/calculators.htm   — clinical calculation
http://doctor.webmd.com  — web MD
http://www.oncologystat.com/index.html   — oncology statistics
http://www.wikipedia.org    — ultimate reference

One thing I can surely say of my job is I always find something new to learn, which gives me a sense of accomplishment and keeps me going, not a big one though.