Alert the media

I just registered to apply to take the USMLE Step 1 (aka: The Boards) in June. $500 later, I am committed to taking the most frightening test in the world in a little more than six months.

Holy. Shit.

All the news that's news

It's coming up on test time again, so clearly, it is time for procrastination. Lots of things have been happening lately, though, so I do at least have some alterior motives other than getting away from studying.

First off, yesterday was my birthday, and it was fabulous. My family got me a new printer that prints wirelessly and prints photos that are better quality than I've recently gotten at any drugstore kiosk, so I'm currently waiting as it prints over 50 pictures from Germany the last time I was there--which, sadly, was over 3 years ago. It's just too darn easy for digital pictures to stay on the camera rather than going in the albums I buy for them...but hopefully now it will be easier to print them all in the loveliness of my own home!

This is particularly useful because it will be helpful to have my pictures from my last European adventure printed off before we begin our next one...because D and I are headed to Vienna for my spring break as a sort of "last hurrah before B gets sucked into the hospitals." I'm incredibly excited--for our one year anniversary, his gift to me was that we would save up enough money to do Europe again before our 2nd anniversary, and lo and behold we actually did it. I'm incredibly excited--we were going back and forth for a long time between Vienna and northern Italy (Florence, etc.), but ended up going with Vienna because it's my favorite city in the world and D hasn't ever been. We'll probably take a side trip to Graz while we're there, which is where I studied the last time. It'll be cool to show him everything I did and saw when I was there for so long.

In medical news, my time in the student-run clinics is almost over, which makes me really sad. Last Monday, I only got to see one patient, but he was an incredibly cute little boy who made me giggle. It will definitely be nice to have Monday nights back again for studying and such, but I'll miss working with people. Nice to have something to look forward to for next year beyond all this studying and board prep and insanity.

I also got to spend last Friday morning hanging out with the OB team on the labor and delivery ward as part of a special event a school club was hosting. Unfortunately, it was an incredibly slow day with only about 3 women on the wards (two of whom had just arrived and were not going to deliver their babies any time soon), but we did get to see one C-section before we left. It was really neat to watch, but I have to say that the more I do other things, the more I find myself to be a peds person. While we were watching the C-section on Friday, every other student in the room was completely captivated by the surgery (ooh! look at all the blood and guts and gore and grossness! Cool!!!!)--and I was too, until the baby was born. Once he was out, I was totally into him and what the pediatricians were doing--checking APGARs, reflexes, etc. I keep trying to give other specialties a clear shot in my head--I mean, I could end up liking something other than peds, and I want to have an open mind--but every time I do I just can't seem to get away from the kiddos. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe not, but I don't know that there's much I can do about it...just have to wait and see what happens next year.

Babies just turn me into a big ball of doctor mush.

Swamped

To use Katya's oh-so-apt description in her comment on my last post, I have been absolutely swamped this past week. The nice thing about second year is that the week after our exams (which I did quite well on) we have a week of nothing but ICM--which essentially means we show up for class and do nothing else. It's lovely, and I read three books just for pleasure and wallowed in the normalcy of it all--coming home at 4pm, watching tv, having dinner, hanging out with D, all that. Unfortunately, the first week back to legitimate studying has been sort of a slap in the face.

We started the week with lung pathology, which was the worst bear of a subject to get through, mainly because the professor was completely incapable of paring down the material--the first two lectures (one hour each) contained a grand total of 187 powerpoint slides. I mean--really? It took me about 4 hours just to slog through the material that day.

Once I got through that, however, the week has been alright, if busy--we started genetics, which I always enjoy, and are starting to learn about all the nasty bacteria that cause all the nasty diseases in micro, which is actually kind of cool. I precepted twice this week and actually knew what was going on with a few patients. It's probably silly, but I still find it utterly fascinating when I'm actually in the hospital and people are throwing around words and phrases and ideas that I've just learned about in class--it's a moment where my brain just sits there thinking, "Wait--this actually happens? In real life? To real people??!!" Too cool. Except, of course, when you realize that the disease that does actually happen in real life to real people is metastatic lung cancer.

In my preceptorship time yesterday, our first patient of the day was a middle-aged man who had been at work and had a seizure. They brought him to the emergency room to do a CT, and discovered that the seizure was caused by a spot in his brain that was probably a metastasis from lung cancer (which he never knew he had). When we arrived in the room to talk to him and his wife, we were basically explaining the biopsy that would occur later that afternoon to confirm the diagnosis. He was actually quite calm and understanding--his father had apparently died of the same thing, and he understood that we were not talking cure but comfort, and that he was looking at months (if not weeks) to live. His wife did not take it so well--she held herself together, but it was clear that she was terrified, shocked, bewildered by the sudden new direction their life had taken. What do you say to people when you're discussing their imminent death? The doctor I worked with was fabulous--exactly the right amount of kindness, understanding, and honesty I hope I can someday offer to people who are having the worst day of their life.

Of course, the weird part is you participate in something like that, something that has stopped that patient's world on a dime--you talk, and listen, and console, and offer advice--and then you go back to your day, back to the other patients and the studying and the work. It's a strange world, this doctor business.

Luckily, to shrug off the utterly depressing experience, my sister came home from college this weekend for the fall festival in our town and we're all going there for lunch today to pig out on elephant ears and chicken and dumplings and doughnuts. Thankfully, this will occur before my lecture on heart disease next week, after which I will probably never be able to eat fatty foods again. :-)