A change from the usual today.
On Friday, the Washington Post published an interesting profile of a cardiologist in Arizona named Jack Wolfson. Dr. Wolfson has made a name for himself recently as a physician who encourages his patients to not vaccinate their children. Also, he goes on TV a lot now to talk anti-vaccine stuff, even as children in the southwestern United States have measles.
MEASLES! Continue reading
Upon returning from winter break, I started up rotations again with psychiatry. Psych is unlike every other block in so many ways: there’s no physical exam, you spend tons of time with patients, and we have basically no idea why any major treatment works. Really.
I need to qualify the rest of this post, as usual when I say untoward things about people or fields where I’m working: patients here are clearly sick and need intense treatment, and there is nothing funny about people who are seriously mentally ill. Continue reading
My time on trauma was probably the most intense three weeks of medical school so far – even compared to the three weeks leading up to a major block exam, like I’ve written about before. When you hear “trauma,” you think of crazy accidents and dramatic TLC reenactments and emergency surgeries. There is some of that, but the majority of the time is spent in the ICU after someone has been stabilized “status post” getting hit by a Volvo. In other words, critical care. Continue reading
Turns out you don’t have much time to blog during surgery. At my school, the surgical rotation is split in three: two weeks for a “subspecialty” rotation, which for me was anesthesia, and then three weeks each for paired general surgery services. My pairings were trauma and laparoscopic GI surgeries, better known as “GI-Lap.” Continue reading
My first taste of surgery, the first two weeks, was on the anesthesiology service. Anesthesia was awesome. It’s a “surgical” specialty that has magical hours: my day usually ran from 6:30 to around 5 in the afternoon. Compared to trauma, where the hours can only be described as horrible (we’ll get there), this was a cakewalk. A typical day: Continue reading
It has been a rough four weeks for humor.
Last time I wrote, I was finishing up my OB/GYN rotation – may it forever stay in my past – and beginning surgery. My first two weeks on surgery were in anesthesia, which has scant moments of humor. Now I’m rotating through the trauma service, which is essentially The ICU For People Who Get Hit By Volvos. So that, plus needing time to sleep, equals no posts in a month. Continue reading
Yesterday I told you about the move to a pass-fail system. Regrettably, the change does nothing to ameliorate the other major stressor of being on the wards – pimping.
Pimping is an old method of Socratic-teaching-gone-wrong where a senior doctor instills his or her worldly knowledge in you by asking question after question until you can no longer answer, then humiliates you by either explaining the answer like you are a toddler or by requiring you to look it up and present the topic the next day. Or hour, if life really sucks. Continue reading
Thus spake Mom.
I’m currently in my final week of the inpatient portion of my first rotation, obstetrics and gynecology. The whole block is eight weeks, but the first month is subdivided into two weeks on “L&D” – labor and delivery – and two weeks on surgical gynecology. Continue reading
Allow me to sum up the collective emotions of my class: OH GOD ROTATIONS START IN TWO DAYS AND YAAAAAAAAAAAAH. Continue reading
A week after our final physical diagnosis exam was our last “end of block assessment” of first year, which is fancy med school terminology for “final exam.” Like our other tests in first year, it was remarkable only for how long it was (fourteen-ish hours over three days) and for how absurd some of the questions were. Continue reading
crashing resident 