ERAS is in, my away rotations are done, and I’m stuck here waiting for interview invitations along with the other 100% of 4th year medical students. Well, except the two loudly proclaiming to all who will listen, “I HAVE SO MANY INVITES GUYS SO MANY INVITES!”
You know who you are. Continue reading
Last week contained fourteen hours’ worth of exams – our comprehensive “end of block assessment” for the systems of the heart, lung, kidney, and blood. Plus anatomy and many other things I didn’t know. The Friday portion of the exam was a three-hour multiple choice exam of boards-style questions. For those of you that aren’t medical people, boards questions are notoriously difficult and are representative of the test all graduating medical students must pass to match into a residency program. An example: Continue reading
YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.
There.
We have a test coming up next week, and it is a huge one. Normal and abnormal stuff for hearts, lungs, kidneys, and blood. There is a lot of stuff that is supposed to go right and a lot of things that can go wrong. (See? I’ve been studying!) The test is three days long, starting on Tuesday.
Vomit. Continue reading
I’ve written quite a bit this academic year about our Physical Diagnosis class, including encounters with standardized patients. But starting in a couple of weeks, things change dramatically. Instead of practicing skills on standardized patients, we enter the hospital under the guidance of an assigned “tutor” to apply our lecture knowledge of the physical exam. Continue reading
Two posts in one week? Must be winter break.
Working through the lung unit is the perfect time to get a lecture in about hypersensitivity reactions. “Hypersensitivity” is medicine’s fancy word for “my head takes on the size and consistency of a watermelon when the weather changes” or “my body thinks a cashew is smallpox.” Continue reading
After covering the heart and the kidneys, we’re now on the lungs. And with the lungs come chest x-rays. With chest x-rays come opacities and focal calcifications and diffuse consolidations. Also confusion, incompetency, and dismay.
We had an hour-long lecture on chest x-rays earlier this week by a very effusive radiologist. He was quite intent that radiology is the best specialty and nearly begged us to come visit him in the radiology suite, which I can only assume is a dark closet in the hospital sub-basement. He spent so much time trying to impress upon us that radiology is the funnest, greatest specialty of them all that I am quite convinced it is not. Continue reading
Somewhat boring/necessary background unless you’re in my class:
At most schools, anatomy is taught in one continuous block, usually at the beginning of the year. By the time September rolls around, most students can identify bizarre-sounding muscles and tell you which stringy pale thing is a vein and which is a nerve. It’s harder than you think.
Our medical school works differently than most. We learn anatomy in segments, according to whatever physiologic systems we’re covering that block. For instance, this 12-week block, called Homeostasis, includes the heart, lung, and kidney. So we’ve dissected most of the thorax, where the heart and lungs are, and examined normal and abnormal kidneys in pathology lab (I’ve written about this previously). Continue reading
crashing resident 