Saturday, December 06, 2008

Medicine Floor

I started on my Medicine rotation. The residents and the interns are great. They are super smart and more than willing to teach. My first week was uneventful. Had a patient with angioedema from ACE Inhibitor and another patient with chest pains that wanted to be in the hospital for the holiday. Then I had the Thanksgiving and the Friday off. So really not much.

Just finished the second week and had a new team of the resident and intern because of the new month. They are chilled and fun to be around. I'm definitely enjoying my time on the floors with them. They are very efficient so a lot of the times we would all finish our rounding by 10am. They assign the students about 2-3 patients at a time. And a lot of the time, whenever there's a fairly simple procedures, they would let us do most of it. Pretty neat.

This week we've got a couple interesting ones. We had a Ludwig's angina, Steven Johnson Syndrome, Ascites due to Schistosomiasis and another due to alcohol. I was also able to observe a bone marrow biopsy. St Mikes definitely is not lacking in any interesting diagnosis.

The biopsy and aspiration has pretty much turn me off on Heme/Onc. The biopsy wasn't too bad but I don't think I can handle the painful melodramatic screaming. That's not the worst part for me. Just thinking about how the whole patient population is dying from cancer of some form and the point is to prolong their lives, even though we know it's hopeless. I know that the whole profession is like this but Heme/Onc was more obvious.

As more and more I think about my choice for the rest of my life, I working more and more to set myself up for anesthesiology. Hopefully that will pan out for 4th year rotations. It's still a little too early for it, but there's a lot of leg work since I'm going to go the allopathic route.

I finally settled on the COMLEX Step 2 dates.
July 7 - PE
July 16 - CE
USMLE Step 2 CK will depend on how the studying goes. If I do take it, it will be late July/early Aug.

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