January 2011
31 posts
Day 538
My family came by my apartment today and took me out to lunch at a local Mexican restaurant. I was so stressed out with my deadlines for stupid projects and how behind I am in my studying because of said stupid projects that I couldn’t even enjoy it. I literally can’t remember the last time I saw my girlfriend who goes to the same university as I do. It feels like it’s been...
Day 537
Gasparilla Lite
I spent today catching up on lectures from this past week. I rode my bike a few times down to the water to take a couple mediocre photos of Tampa’s crazy pirate fest called Gasparilla. I think I’m just starved for different subject matter here. Although I think one of the marks of a good photographer is the ability to make almost any scene seem interesting.
Day 536
I worked the Judeo-Chirstian free clinic again today as part of our physical diagnosis program. I stayed from one to six even though we were supposed to be done before five. I did a full work up on a 29 year old Caucasian woman with more issues than I care to remember. It was enjoyable talking to her for about an hour alone in the the examining room. When I took her history I found out a few...
Day 535
I studied at school all day and then went to a family friend’s house to talk to their son about medical school because he is contemplating becoming a doctor. I didn’t exactly discourage him but I told him the truth. I asked him why he wanted to be a doctor and he gave me the typical schpeal about wanting to be there for people in their time of need. I told him that was the wrong...
Day 534
I’m exhausted. This week they dumped so much stuff on us, it’s left me begging for mercy. It doesn’t help that most of it is busy work that isn’t conducive to learning at all. I wasted a ton of time writing an abstract for a small group that doesn’t affect our grade and in which the teacher all of a sudden went from being a nice guy to a completely rude jerk for not apparent reason. To...
Day 533
My love/hate relationship with surgery continues. I woke up again cursing myself for wanting to do this but by the time I got out of the OR I felt so sure that I wanted to be a surgeon I felt silly for thinking otherwise. When I was young, I shadowed some surgeons and became infatuated with surgery. Now that I experience it week in and week out, I’m moving past the infatuation and learning to...
Day 532
So the test was a lot more difficult than I thought but mostly because it was poorly written.
We had questions as outrageous as:
A 29 year old woman comes into the emergency room and immediately dies of a drug overdose. What drug was she on?
and
A 5 year old is said to have a brain tumor. What part of the brain is it located in?
I thought we were being trained to become doctors not...
Day 531
Well, I went to church today to praise God for giving me an understanding of such a large amount of material, material that may save someone’s life some day. It was a relaxing day studying pharm mostly. I feel okay about this test. I think everything will be alright in the end.
Day 530
I had a great review session tonight with some of the brightest minds in my class. I was super excited when it was over because I rocked the pathology and PMIID that we talked about even though I didn’t do so hot on the pharm. There are very few times when I feel confident about anything med school and this is one of them so I think I should document that.
Day 529
This morning I had a tutoring session for pathology and afterward I felt pretty depressed because I felt like I didn’t know anything. I studied at school all day and it turns out that was thing I could have done. My friend Cara informed me that one of the teachers had pretty much given us the questions he was gonna ask on the test and my friend Val told me that I didn’t have to know...
Day 528
Study, Study, Study
Day 527
We had a musculoskeletal PD skills session today where we went to the facility the athletic trainers use. Each athletic trainer student had two of us med students to teach and all three of us practiced the techniques on each other. I’m not gonna lie, it was kind of awkward. Having a stranger and someone you barely know wrap their hands around your arms and legs and manipulate them in all...
Day 526
I have a love/hate relationship right now with surgery.
This morning I woke up and the first words out of my mouth were “Why am I doing this?!!”.
Later in the O.R. I got pimped on nerves during a thyroidectomy.
The rest of the morning really wasn’t too bad at all.
I found out my LCE surgeon is the CHIEF OF SURGERY!
I should have known, he’s like the most respected...
Day 525
My friend Sean came over today and helped me straighten out the video editing problems I’ve been having! So that means Outwatch the Bear is back on track to be completed soonish. Besides that, all studying today. I forgot to call my LCE surgeon today to find out what cases we have tomorrow morning so it looks like I’m in for a surprise. I’m not expecting to do as well as last...
Day 524
There’s nothing to write about this weekend. It’s really boring. I’m just studying at home for hours and hours on end. I am getting nervous about the Step 1 exam. Maybe I should note that. It’s four months away, but still. I signed up for an online question bank today. I’m still not sure what my study schedule will look like though.
Day 523
This is a “three day weekend” for much of the rest of the world. Just means more studying and less class time for med students. Fine by me.
Day 522
This is a weird block. There’s a lot of pharmacology and I thought there was a lot of pathology too but it turns out that there’s been like three “clinical conferences” for path in which they didn’t give us any new information. So basically, instead of having to recognize a ton of stuff, we have to know not as much stuff really well.
I received my copy of the...
Day 521
Study, Study, Study
Day 520
This week is a 31 credit hour week in med school. The max you can take in undergrad is 18. Still, it doesn’t seem as intense as I thought probably because there was only one mandatory class this week and that was on monday. I went to class today too though because one of my favorite lecturers ever was teaching. He’s a psychiatrist who works at the VA outpatient clinic and...
Day 519
Finally.
A day in surgery where I was not utterly humiliated.
I actually knew almost everything the surgeon asked me.
I wouldn’t say he was exactly impressed but he did act like he felt we were finally getting somewhere. And I think for that reason, he let me close someone up today via stapling! Pretty exciting although I’m sure anyone who’s not in med school could easily do...
Day 518
Our CPS case today was a roller coaster ride. We initially were pretty sure about the diagnosis being a congenital metabolic disease, then a test came back negative, then we investigated a bunch of other possible diagnosis’s only to hear later that the grandmother of the child suddenly remembered he had played with mothballs meaning he had eaten mothballs meaning he had naphthalene...
Day 517
No Place Like Home
Day 516
Study, Study, Study
Day 515
“You’ve got to find another way to help them.”
There is nothing intrinsically astounding about that quote. It was something said by one of our pharmacology lecturers today in class. She probably didn’t even think much of it. But for some reason I WAS astounded by it. Why? I think it’s because we spend so much time studying these little intricacies of...
Day 514
We had an arts and humanities scholarly concentration meeting today in which I played a rough mix of one of the songs from the new album for everyone and showed them the layout for the booklet which is almost finalized. Our faculty leader said I was “clever”. I guess that’s a compliment.
Besides the usual lecture watching and studying, the rest of the day had me running...
Day 513
I attended a surgical interest group meeting at lunch that my LCE surgeon would have loved. The famous Dr. Schwartz who literally wrote THE book on surgery (Schwartz’s Principals of Surgery to be exact) gave us a presentation on the greatest contributions of American surgeons to the field. It was pretty awesome as I am a big fan of both the U.S. and surgery. While I don’t remember...
Day 512
Dr. Crohn was a gastroenterologist who worked at Mt. Sinai in New York and published his paper in 1932 on Crohn’s disease. When I relayed that information as well as other facts about Dr. Crohn and the disease he described, I think I kind of impressed by LCE surgeon at the beginning of the day before his first operation. The surgeon had been adamant about me knowing certain things about...
Day 511
The first day back was a quiet one. I went to CPS and then watched six hours of lecture in the library before going home. Studying outside in the courtyard attracted the attention of several of my fellow second years. Mostly because I was studying anatomy. I explained to them all that I had an intense surgical LCE I had to prepare for every week. They expressed their sympathy. I could feel...
Day 510
The last day of Christmas break turned sad near the end. I have probably the hardest five months of my life ahead of me and I don’t know where or who I will be at the end of it.
Kevin came over and we recorded some of the last few guitar parts together. We still have a couple more to go. Then we talked about the transitions we are going to place between each song to make them flow...
Day 509
Old and New
New Years Day included a photo walk through the outskirts of Ybor with Polley and Amber. We went with no particular idea in mind, just cameras and impulses. I had photographed a few buildings on these streets before so I tried to find a few new things. Rooftop access was one of those things.
And now I’m going to do a very bloggy thing and shamelessly promote my other...
Day 508
Hello 2011
Lets be honest. This has been a bad year.
I’ve received by far the worst grades I’ve ever received in my life. I’ve felt more incompetent than I ever have before. And I’ve failed over and over and over again at the thing I’ve spent most of my existence working toward.
Enough of that. Today, I finished writing a song with Trey Tomlinson on...