Guess who graduated residency… but is still in training!?
So now I’m starting my toxicology fellowship. I’m now at a different large academic center, still on the West Coast, and am six weeks in.
Fellowship is going well, except that I wake up every day consumed with a blinding and violent rage – not toward my training program but toward the university’s HR department.
Continue readingYes, it has been very long. This is because my life outside of residency lately has been consumed with raising a small weapon of mass destruction named Otis.
This is Otis when I got him:
This is Otis now:
As you can see, he is a) much bigger and b) a Systematic Toy Destroyer. A well-meaning resident gifted me a plush toy for him; Otis ripped it in half in about thirty seconds.
The new interns started their orientation this week.
I say this mostly because it means I am just a few short days away from no longer being “the intern.” This is fantastic news, mostly because it relieves me of the duty of explaining to non-medical people the vestigial and archaic distinction between an intern and a resident. Just so everyone (grandma) remembers:
I made that diagram. Aren’t you impressed?
Although it has been quite some time since my last post, rest assured that I – along with my classmates – were diligently at work, grinding through pathophysiology of kidney disease and Obtaining Outside Medical Reco—haha, no, we were all on vacation.
I went home to D.C., played with my dog, went to Colombia for two weeks, and drank on the beach enough to poison the Gulf of Mexico. Continue reading
My time at the VA intensive care unit has come to a close, and while I am currently enrolled in a class (name: “Medical Imaging and Anatomy,” actual name, “Nate Gives Absolutely No F*cks”), what I’m actually doing is just twiddling my thumbs until it’s time to match on Friday. Continue reading
When I last wrote about being in the intensive care unit, I was coming off a three-month research stint where my primary job was perfecting the art of appearing busy while actually doing nothing. I achieved true expertise in this area and earned commendations for my efforts, if not for my actual research. Continue reading
I’ve written twice before about funky medical words – once in first year, with Commonest Erythematous Palpation, and once at the end of second year with A Lexical Update. As I hit the big orange “CERTIFY” button on the rank list page last week, I realized that there is a completely different dictionary for the fourth year medical student.
As useless extra hands in the hospital go, we have basically completed our penance and have become experts in the Med Student Daily Apologia For Being An Idiot. In celebration, many of us – yours truly included – took huge chunks of time off to apply for and interview at residency programs. The process, while fun and exhausting and replete with enormous amounts of Netflix binge-watching, also generated a lexicon all on its own. Continue reading
Two things right up front:
With that said, I write this post while experiencing a fairly complex, ebbing and flowing mix of trepidation, desperation, apathy, and outright nihilism. These are the emotions of a compromised fourth year student with a willpower wellspring shallower than a lunchbox. When you do nothing for almost three months, your brain atrophies; at this point, all I’m really capable of doing is following the smells of free food and clicking “Yes, I’m Still Watching” on the Netflix popup. This bodes poorly for my ICU rotation starting tomorrow. Continue reading
Next month, I’ll be doing my sub-internship at a veteran’s hospital near my home school. A sub-internship is supposed to be a capstone to medical school, a chance to behave “like the intern” in preparation for the actual ass-clenching panic of actually being an intern.
(It also means that I will be writing much, much less, which is probably a welcome respite for those of you not named Grandma.)
The VA, as it affectionately and simultaneously-not-affectionately known, is one of my favorite places in the medical universe. Continue reading
I have three interviews left before I have only to sit down in an echo chamber and perform the mental equivalent of processing pasta dough – taking all the raw information and feelings from the last two months and distilling them down into a rank list.
It’s amusing, really, to think back on how things have changed since the September days of waiting anxiously by the computer for an interview to come in. This pregnant waiting period was only interrupted when disappointed by yet another CALL TO ACTION!, or alert about a very important lecture series where there will be FREE PIZZA if you will just RSVP, but that’s neither here nor there. Continue reading
crashing resident 