October 2010
34 posts
Day 446
EKGs (aka ECGs) ARE AWESOME!!!
Seriously, who invented this thing because they are a genius.
It makes so much sense and you can tell a lot about the patient’s condition just by looking at these little wave forms. Crazy. I was starting to get kind of down today because I realized I am only four days into a new block and already the amount of information that has been given to us is...
Day 445
I found out that my next LCE rotation is going to be general surgery! I’m not happy about it being in another city, 45 minutes away but at least it’s something I want to do and I heard from another classmate that the doctor is good. Hopefully this will help me decide if surgery is right for me. I can’t wait. But I am going to miss the kids.
Day 444
Samuel Shem
Before his Grand Rounds speech, Sam Shem (aka Steven Bergman) remarked to one of my classmates that he would have actually gone into surgery if it wasn’t for the extra time to write that psychiatry afforded him because “surgeons actually do things!”. Awesome.
His speech was largely taken from his newest essay titled “Fiction As Resistance” in...
Day 443
Yep.
I met Samuel Shem (actually Stephen Bergman) tonight at a dinner party held by the faculty leader of my medical arts and humanities scholarly concentration. I found him to be a pretty interesting and interested man. Maybe it was the psychologist in him but it felt like he asked us more questions than we asked him. He seemed to genuinely care about knowing us as friends and not just...
Day 442
LCE started with a mother telling one of the nurses that she didn’t want me looking at her child’s genitals. My LCE doctor and the nurse that this was absurd and told me so. I told them that it was really okay, explaining that I’ve had more than my fill of looking at both live and dead penises over the past 14 months. Later on I got to examine some more small children and...
Day 441
Life In the Big City
The test was weird. Unlike last time, they actually gave us a lot of the key words we needed to diagnose the illnesses. There were still the occasional two sentence question stems that you had to use to diagnose (or as my friend likes to call them, “Email Diagnoses”) but overall it was okay. There were a few questions I think I got wrong though based on the...
Day 440
All of this information inside of me is a house of cards ready to be blown over by the mild wind I create when I let out a sigh after reading how terrible these questions are going to be tomorrow. After that, there’s nothing to do but gather them up, play again, and hope for a better hand.
Day 439
If I have to look at one more picture of someone with herpes in their eye, I am going to throw up.
Day 438
This morning I finally got my hands on a copy of The Legible Script. It’s an annual literary journal that publishes the writing and visual art of medical students around the country. An essay I wrote about seeing my first lung transplant made it in as well as a “poem” that is really the lyrics of a song called “Silhouettes In Smoke” that will be on the new EP. I...
Day 437
After a physical diagnosis lecture that my friend Allison co-taught (and did a splendid job might I add), we had a skills session for eyes and one for head and neck.
There is so much information for this test that I can’t wrap my brain around it. This year doesn’t seem harder than last year to me except that, more often than last year, I feel totally overwhelmed by the sheer...
Day 436
Today was a day that progressed from quiet desperation to hope and thankfulness through a series of seemingly random conversations and interactions with a variety of people from all walks of life. It was a day that made me believe I wasn’t made to be a medical student; I was made to be a doctor. And also a great creator, listener, and re-writer of stories.
So far, I owe my...
Day 435
I properly assessed/diagnosed a 12 year old boy today. What did he have? Nothing really. But that’s the point. Sometimes, often times, it’s harder to make the diagnosis that there is nothing serious enough to treat than it is to just prescribe an antibiotic or order more tests. At least in pediatrics. In reality you could say the boy had a lot of things wrong with him. He was an...
Day 434
I don’t know what’s wrong with me but lately I’ve been feeling really apathetic toward school. I study but it’s like I don’t even care about the material. I unconsciously look for anything and everything that can distract me from studying dermatology or tumors. I can’t make up crazy pictures or stories to help me memorize things anymore. I don’t know,...
Day 433
Study, Study, Study
Day 432
Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros
Polley and I saw Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros at The Ritz tonight in Ybor. As expected, it was an energetic and delightful performance! The band has a fun 70’s folk rock sound that even with ten members is never too convoluted to digest. Even the mix was really good. I was in the very front by the stage and I could here every instrument...
Day 431
I finally finished recording cello tonight with Grace. It feels so good to be done with the strings for the EP. I also tracked vocals for one song and an acoustic guitar piece for the refrain of one of the last songs. The thing about recording guitar that is difficult for me is when I have to play the same exact progression over and over again. I think my mind becomes numb to it and I get...
Day 430
For some silly reason, I have been neglecting to talk about the music I’ve been listening to for quite some time on this blog. Well a recent purchase has just spurred me out of my silence. On tuesday, I picked up Sufjan Steven’s new album The Age Of Adz and after listening to it in it’s entirety once through I decided it was most definitely the musical disappointment of the...
Day 429
A day without lectures. It’s almost true. We had a poorly scheduled mandatory PD class on dermatology at 8am which left half the class with a huge gap in time until our LCE small group at 1pm. But maybe I’m just a sleepy/lazy med student who doesn’t want to get out of bed that early. The PD lecture was good and the small group was not too bad either. As much as I don’t...
Day 428
It happened! I finally have my LCE small group case. And all because a little 21 month old girl showed up with a couple rashes and was born without a thyroid. Finally, something substantial to report on! Don’t worry, she’s going to be just fine. I’m not heartless. Apparently, all the really sick kids and rare cases come in on Mondays to the pediatric office because people...
Day 427
We had a pathology lecture today that was “blacked out”. That is to say that they refused to post the powerpoint or the video of the lecture because it contained photos of various injuries on people who were already dead and supposedly it would be some kind of felony if those images got into the wrong hands. Of course they didn’t tell us they were going to do this until the...
Day 426
Study, Study, Study
Day 425
I had another dream last night about medical school. I don’t have them too often but when I do they are always horrifying. My dad, an attorney, says he had similar dreams in law school. In this one I showed up a little late at an important event where everyone in the school was dressed up in suits. I was dressed nice but I wasn’t in a suit so they told me a couldn’t come in. ...
Day 424
So some lady apparently gave us three lectures in two hours today. How did that happen? And more importantly, what were they about? Something with bones I think. I’m definitely gonna need a tutor to sort this stuff out.
Day 423
Watched lectures on double speed pretty much all day. At night, some friends and I hopped over to the parked downtown to watch a free live show by Have Gun Will Travel. It was a fun show (complete with a multitude of dogs and children running around) although the sound system was pretty weak. While we were there we ran into a few of the 4th year students from the med school including the one...
Day 422
Street Walking
I re-started designing the cd booklet for the Year One EP tonight. After the test Monday, the art director of the medical school helped me figure out my issues with the resolution of the images I was using so now everything can really come together. In the afternoon, I visited the tiny art gallery in the student union building on campus. There was a really great exhibit there...
Day 421
As you probably have concluded, I feel like the exam could have gone better yesterday. But today is a new day. Today I got to be around children, something that always makes me feel considerably better. In LCE I did my first real throat swab to test for strep throat. The funny thing was, the one who suggested I do it was the 16 year old kid who I was examining. Guided by the pediatrician, I...
Day 420
Dear Faculty of the Medical School Which I Pay Over $14,000 a Semester to Attend,
I do not care about your research. I do not care about the research your colleagues are doing that you find interesting. I do not care about the research that the scientific idols who you adore are doing. I did not come to this school for a PhD. I came here for an MD. If it is not something that will help me...
Day 419
More studying fun (and sarcasm). I am exhausted but the thing is, I really, really like this material. It’s so amazing to be able to look at all those numbers from labs you used to get a glance at in the doctor’s office or the hospital growing up and actually know what they mean. I think its equivalent to learning a foreign language. I really hope and pray I do well on this test for the simple...
Day 418
This was one of the longest days I’ve had in a while. I stayed at the med school studying till 2am.
I found out my friend Jessica has just as many ridiculous and useful ways of remembering drugs as I do. Study buddy? I think yes.
Mostly, I mooch off the intelligence of others. I see nothing wrong with that.
Day 417
Study, Study, Study
Day 416
Another day, another good Path lab.
Day 415
We typed our own blood today! I honestly didn’t really have any idea of what I was doing but the phlebotomist lady in the white coat seemed who was generously guiding me verbally knew what was going on. I had known my blood type before from donating blood and that was good because in the end I was able to know for sure that I hadn’t screwed up the process of mixing all the antibodies and what...
Day 414
It’s been very difficult to find an LCE case to share with my small group. Nothing substantial has come up (maybe because half the kids I see are pretty healthy) and everything that looks promising ends up flattening out into something I could some up in two or three sentences. I think part of the reason is that so much of pediatric treatment is empirical. Almost never are cultures grown...
Day 413
We had an immunology small group session in the morning that was once again about something obscure but it was good to know because there is a small chance that we might see something like it in the U.S. In the afternoon we had another clinical problem solving session. It turned out well, we correctly diagnosed the virtual patient with a pulmonary embolism. It was a diagnosis some of us were...
