oh god so now i'm skimming the FIRST AID GUIDE TO THE WARDS and they're saying that you should chedule yr EM rotation near the end of yr third year because you'll have covered most of the material in your other stuff, and will thus be better informed. which is of course otm. i, however, enthusiastically scheduled it as my fourth rotation (after Med I, Surg I, and an ortho elective), even though the draft/lottery meant there were plenty of slots available in the spring.
now i'm worried i'm gonna fuck up/not be impressive and i really want to get a good LOR (esp since i'm going through HCMC, which is the OG EM program in the country, and highly respected) :(
why i'm worrying about this now and not, say, studying for my impending GI exam is beyond me, but w/e
― nitzer ebbebe (gbx), Tuesday, 9 March 2010 22:10 (fourteen years ago) link
it's amazing, the first two years i've been *yawn* w/e when my classmates starting sounding careerist, and now i'm getting totally mercenary about planning my future.
― nitzer ebbebe (gbx), Tuesday, 9 March 2010 22:11 (fourteen years ago) link
I was just at a Surgery Interest talk thing last night and they were like "honestly it doesn't matter when you do what you're planning to do; any reasonable instructor is going to know that people doing a rotation early are still going to be mostly clueless, and adjust accordingly." And man did I ever need to hear that. (All of the panelists were coincidentally people who did surgery 1st to get it out of the way and then loved it way more than they had expected.)
Most of the awesome docs and fourth years I've ever talked to were just like "Show up, be enthusiastic, work hard, and admit when you don't know what you're doing", whereas most of the people who are like "behold my secret formula" were kinda douchebags. Hopefully that means something.
― C-L, Tuesday, 9 March 2010 23:03 (fourteen years ago) link
that IS reassuring tbh.
― nitzer ebbebe (gbx), Tuesday, 9 March 2010 23:05 (fourteen years ago) link
Also I would assume your disinterest in studying for GI is because it is SO BORING. At least the pathology, anyway. I think we are going to get some lectures on parasites in the next couple days and hopefully that will make up for all the pathology.
― C-L, Tuesday, 9 March 2010 23:27 (fourteen years ago) link
I kinda like GI???
― nitzer ebbebe (gbx), Wednesday, 10 March 2010 00:00 (fourteen years ago) link
Basically the digestive and reproductive systems are only interesting to me as sources of metabolic and hormonal imbalances, so from like the diaphragm to the pelvis I just kind of endure it. (Although I guess the adrenals and a lot of the spine are also in that space, and I do enjoy the adrenals and the spine.)
― C-L, Wednesday, 10 March 2010 00:13 (fourteen years ago) link
ok i am in small group and all we're talking about is farts, it's hilarious
― nitzer ebbebe (gbx), Thursday, 11 March 2010 15:16 (fourteen years ago) link
LOL, in his efforts to make sure N. and I never went to med school, N's dad was extremely fond of playing an old reel-to-reel tape from 1949's International Crepitation Competition.
― ned ragú (suzy), Thursday, 11 March 2010 15:20 (fourteen years ago) link
Maybe the U of M has a copy?
aaaaaand apparently someone did a study here (that got published in NEJM) to investigate why we have floaters.
― nitzer ebbebe (gbx), Thursday, 11 March 2010 15:23 (fourteen years ago) link
as in poop floaters?
― quincie, Thursday, 11 March 2010 15:24 (fourteen years ago) link
yup
― nitzer ebbebe (gbx), Thursday, 11 March 2010 15:25 (fourteen years ago) link
CW was that they were fatty/oily, apparently they are full of air!
BOAK well then, that lamb curry can wait...
― ned ragú (suzy), Thursday, 11 March 2010 15:29 (fourteen years ago) link
99 POOP BALLOONS
― quincie, Thursday, 11 March 2010 16:23 (fourteen years ago) link
to add to the list of med school band names:
TOXIC MEGACOLON
― drink more beer and the doctor is a heghog (gbx), Tuesday, 16 March 2010 15:34 (fourteen years ago) link
I would listen to a band called Volvulus, unless they were prog-rock.
Additionally, a bunch of my friends play various medical school functions under the name "Palpable Thrill".
― C-L, Tuesday, 16 March 2010 16:48 (fourteen years ago) link
oh volvulus is a good one
― drink more beer and the doctor is a heghog (gbx), Tuesday, 16 March 2010 16:49 (fourteen years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZF9DLwKlb0
― etaeoe, Wednesday, 17 March 2010 16:45 (fourteen years ago) link
wowwwww someone's getting a call from the ~professional standards committee~
― drink more beer and the doctor is a heghog (gbx), Wednesday, 17 March 2010 17:36 (fourteen years ago) link
There is a really decent chance that two years from now, the schedule will work out today so that the 2012 class Match Day falls on the first day of the NCAA tournament. That will be like the best day.
― C-L, Thursday, 18 March 2010 14:54 (fourteen years ago) link
btw did u kno it is
SPRINK BREANG TWENTY THOUSAND TEN YEARS OLD!???!?!?!!?????!!!!!!
― drink more beer and the doctor is a heghog (gbx), Thursday, 18 March 2010 20:27 (fourteen years ago) link
Ugh so jealous! Ours is in a week and a half. I feel that NCAA tournament day 1 + Match Day should be a holiday at all med schools, though. It is such a joyous day! (Except at Vanderbilt, lol @ Murray St)
― C-L, Thursday, 18 March 2010 20:54 (fourteen years ago) link
patient records can pass seamlessly from doctor to specialist to hospital, helping avoid the kind of dangerous slip-ups that cost the lives of an estimated 100,000 people in this country each year.
Are you fucking kidding me? A hundred grand A YEAR??
From NYT.
― Ask foreigners and they will tell you the gospel comes from America. (Laurel), Friday, 26 March 2010 15:51 (fourteen years ago) link
I think the classic number quoted (from an IOM study in 1999 called To Err is Human) is 98,000 per year, or "a jumbo jet falling out of the sky every day."
I dunno how that number has changed over the past decade or so.
― C-L, Saturday, 27 March 2010 02:45 (fourteen years ago) link
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand peace
― midcentury Modern (Lamp), Friday, 30 April 2010 19:32 (fourteen years ago) link
went str8 to the gym swam for 90 mins came home bros on the porch drinking bears got sum indian food slept for like two hours listening to graceland going to see a friend dj 2nite fridge is full of beer all the windows are open and the breeze is coming in ~relaxed~
― midcentury Modern (Lamp), Friday, 30 April 2010 19:34 (fourteen years ago) link
I AM DONE
― rapping about space and shit, floatin’ around in an orgy of screen savers (gbx), Friday, 30 April 2010 19:52 (fourteen years ago) link
lamp let's party
― rapping about space and shit, floatin’ around in an orgy of screen savers (gbx), Friday, 30 April 2010 19:53 (fourteen years ago) link
dude!!!!! on my 2nd beer already tbqf
― midcentury Modern (Lamp), Friday, 30 April 2010 20:10 (fourteen years ago) link
wish u were here cuz its a p sweet time but may the next few weeks bring u nothing but happy trails and smoken climber chix ^_^ also u nvr returned my email about that book!!!!
― midcentury Modern (Lamp), Friday, 30 April 2010 20:11 (fourteen years ago) link
Oh look here is what it looks like when I am envying u guys
― C-L, Friday, 30 April 2010 20:12 (fourteen years ago) link
Although to be fair today I finished my 2nd of 4 exams for this quarter, then went over to the undergrad campus where they had hella free food and a moon bounce. So today was rad but STILL, now I am back in the library trying to finish the final assignment for our terrible terrible ethics class.
― C-L, Friday, 30 April 2010 20:15 (fourteen years ago) link
yeah i have had two beers now already, and it is nap time
leaving tomorrow for Devil's Tower, if the weather improves
C-L: that is a bummer, man, hang in there
― rapping about space and shit, floatin’ around in an orgy of screen savers (gbx), Friday, 30 April 2010 20:40 (fourteen years ago) link
also wait did you send an email to my ilx acct? it is a dummy :(
*checks*
c-l, ive heard from both med and fellow pharm students that ethics class tends to suck, which is bumming me out cuz I was looking forward to it next semester
anyway 4 finals to go
― brandon softerserve (k3vin k.), Friday, 30 April 2010 21:07 (fourteen years ago) link
Yeah at least for me, there are lots of well-meaning educational attempts throughout med school that are just so poorly done that they become incredibly frustrating, and Ethics was the most grossly inept of all. It was esp frustrating since I had the good luck in grad school to see the social sciences and medicine work well together, mostly driven by med anthro dudes who were big about resolving their fieldwork research with the day-to-day of medical practice. And then I got to med school ethics and it was just all absurd hypotheticals and vague platitudes with no takeaway for real life.
― C-L, Saturday, 1 May 2010 02:36 (fourteen years ago) link
I cannot be the only person who wants to spend time during Standardized Patient exams trying to break the 4th wall, right? It is just so tempting to be like "It cannot be very fun to do this all day long for three straight days, can it? I hope they are paying you good." We kinda got to do this with the standardized genital exam patients last month though, which was cool. Apparently once you get over the whole finger-in-butt thing, a prostate exam just feels like someone touching any other part of your body.
In related news, I appear to be very susceptible to dropping the rest of a thorough H&P once I see an opening for potential diagnosis. Especially with standardized exams, where all answers will either be essentially "You have asked a correct question" or "You have asked for information I was not given". Basically once I get on a thread of correct questions it is like a shiny set of keys being jingled in front of me and I forget to be like "So do you have any family history of this issue" or whatever.
― C-L, Wednesday, 5 May 2010 21:45 (fourteen years ago) link
oh man I was pretty fast and loose with the fourth wall, esp when it came to doing mental inventories. I would just blatantly sidebar to run thru my checklist for the PE
also just did some major scheduling judo.
med 1board studying/vacayanatomy TAorthosurg1pedspeds surgspring break!!!EMfam med~three weeks of mystery~OBaway rotationinfectious DZmed/pedsultrasound!!neuropsychmed 2intl rotation...profit!!
― rapping about space and shit, floatin’ around in an orgy of screen savers (gbx), Thursday, 6 May 2010 21:31 (fourteen years ago) link
It loses a little something when you take out the giant "I <3 Hot Nurses" profile photo, but I am like 95% sure from the date of this openbook selection that this dude ran into my classmates after we had finished with Shelf exams: http://i49.tinypic.com/mvt0zm.png
Step 1 studying is the f'ing worst, btw.
― C-L, Friday, 21 May 2010 21:53 (fourteen years ago) link
To address his claims: A fairly decent number, Yes, Some of them, Sort of.
― C-L, Friday, 21 May 2010 21:55 (fourteen years ago) link
so here we are, INTERNAL MEDICINE
first night of call tomorrow yaaaaaaaaaay
― gbx, Tuesday, 25 May 2010 23:10 (fourteen years ago) link
Dang you guys are already in 3rd year? Congrats!
― C-L, Wednesday, 26 May 2010 03:05 (fourteen years ago) link
T minus 8 hours to my Royal College exam. Written tomorrow, OSCE Thursday. Last hurdle after 9 years of medical training.
I'm optimistic.
― The Amy Misto Family Knife (Plasmon), Wednesday, 26 May 2010 04:33 (fourteen years ago) link
you are fake
― 2 minute sock interval (velko), Wednesday, 26 May 2010 04:36 (fourteen years ago) link
Fake what? It's real optimism. And it better be a real exam, the registration fees were ridiculous.
― The Amy Misto Family Knife (Plasmon), Wednesday, 26 May 2010 05:23 (fourteen years ago) link
cool
― 2 minute sock interval (velko), Wednesday, 26 May 2010 05:36 (fourteen years ago) link
hey do any of you guys know about the Bohr effect? I've been practicing Buteyko breathing lately and I don't know if it's the placebo effect or what but I feel my energy levels have been upped a bit by not breathing so much. also I went swimming yesterday and got fatigued less easily when I breathed after every third stroke instead of after every stroke.
― Face Book (dyao), Wednesday, 26 May 2010 06:16 (fourteen years ago) link
I know of it, but tbh only as far as it takes to knock out the Hemoglobin curve questions on an exam (acidity and higher temperature and increased DPG concentrations shift the curve right, decreasing hemoglobin's affinity for oxygen! Increased pH and reduced temperature and decreased DPG shift the curve left, increased hemoglobin affinity for oxygen!)
Since increasing pCO2 reduces pH (with a 10 mmHg increase in pCO2 roughly correlating to a 0.08 drop in the pH, until metabolic compensation can retain enough extra bicarbonate to turn the drop into about 0.04ish), and reducing pH increases the dissociation of oxygen from hemoglobin, it makes sense that you'd be distributing oxygen more efficiently, but exactly how much of a difference this makes in a practical sense, I do not know.
(Note, everything in parentheses in this post was primarily written to reinforce knowledge that I should have going into Boards. Using ILX to study is fun!)
― C-L, Wednesday, 26 May 2010 15:30 (fourteen years ago) link