Wow, it's been a while since my last post. Considering I pretty much hibernated for most of winter break, I guess it's not too surprising, but still.
Some updates:
I am now extended. Biochemistry, once again, was my death knell. I did great in all of my other classes (was JUUUST shy of mastering Genetics and Anatomy), but biochemistry continues to haunt me, and will continue to haunt me for another year. I blame my parents: I have the same initials as the class, BMB. Thanks a bunch, mum and dad! Ah well.
So what does extension mean? It means I will be taking five years to complete my medical degree -spreading classes from the two pre-clinical years into three and then I'm back on track for the rest of my education. It's not all bad. Right now it means I'm not taking three exams a week and generally have more time to do non-medical school things. Except for me that means I'm filling it up with more medical school things, which brings me to my next update....
I just got elected to the Emergency Medicine Interest Group e-board! This means I'm now on three committees...four if you count my unofficial-but-official involvement with Health and Wellness. It's fun though. Rumor has is that EMIG board members get to apply to the ride-along program for Aero Med. Whatever happens, it means I'll get to help set up fun activities like suture clinics, casting clinics, and intubation labs.
I'm also applying to some great summer programs: ethics fellowship at Auschwitz, clinical skills in Turkey, Orthopedic clinics in NY...the possibilities are endless. I'll keep you all posted as I find out!
We've also started "real" clinical skills this semester. Last week I learned how to take a blood pressure and perform a basic eye/ear exam. Right now we're just focusing on how to use the equipment and connect with our patient; we'll learn how to actually utilize the knowledge we gain next year and the years beyond. It was pretty fun. Thankfully my partner is very patient with me, so I was able to get a good look in her eyes, by far the most difficult part of the exam.
We also had a one-day patient education exam, where we were assigned a subject that we had to educate a simulated patient on. I had to teach this adorable older gentleman how to use an epi pen. Mine was relatively straight-forward and allowed me lots of time to just talk with my patient, but a lot of my classmates had more involved subjects (low-sodium diets, TLC diets, etc) that were much more complicated to teach in 15 minutes or less. When we got together as a group to review them, it was interesting to see the different reactions from all the actors. It kind of puts it back in to perspective: we can learn all we want, but if we can't teach it to our patients in a way that they will understand, we can't really help anybody.
Last quick update: I'm the GR committee chair for Med Ball, and we just picked our theme: James Bond! I'm super excited to start planning it :)
Back to the books.....
