The Hippocampus: April 2005

Friday Friday...

I'm getting very spoiled by being able to drive to school everymorning. Normally, it's impossible to drive and park anywhere in the Texas Medical Center, and if you choose to park in a parking garage, the rate is already $10.00 after just 2 hours. It's ridiculous. However, we have morning lectures at the school at 7 in the morning, and there's a small little open parking lot in front of the main building that doesn't fill up until closer to 8. Students aren't normally allowed to park there, but there are exceptions for special seminars, lectures, or classes for clinical students who are off site. So needless to say, since I apply I've been making use of it. Very nice, much better than riding the ol' train everyday.

So ENT is still going quite well. I helped in "tympanoplasty" today, which is reconstructive surgery on the ear drum. Pretty cool to operate with microscopes in such a small little space.
I also saw a patient today who shares the same name as a rather famous horror story villain. Of course I can't say the name here or anywhere due to privacy issues, but it was kind of cool nonetheless. Now it's just time for a fun weekend! :-)

Another week moving along quickly

Ear Nose and Throat is moving along fairly quickly. Week 1 of 2 is already almost over. The hours and workload are certainly much nicer than what general surgery threw in my direction everyday. I like the team much better as well. I spent today in the OR again, we took out a salivary gland and a thyroid. Got home at a decent time too. All in all, can't complain too much. Jay's birthday is coming up so I guess I need to do some shopping for that.

Don't Smoke!

Today I started my small little selective in Otorhinolaryngology, or people who don't have a clue how to say that or even what it means... Ear, Nose, and Throat surgery. This 2 week rotation is going to be much more relaxed than general surgery. Today we pretty much just followed the residents as they saw patients, and then I got to do an impromptu abscess incision that was brought up from the OR. Then, we got to go home. :-) At 1:30 amazingly enough. It gave me time to do some grocery shopping and cook up a new batch of my Mom's spaghetti. Didn't get a chance to eat it tonight, but I should be able to fix that tomorrow.

In and Out of General

Ok so I finished up my rotation in general surgery, or survived may perhaps be the better term. I won't miss the twice a day dressing changes on smelly wounds infected with pus or what not. I also won't miss the bickering amongst the team members and the yelling that goes on to the interns either. It's said and done and I'm finally moving on to something new. We did have our evaluation session today which was quite therapeutic in rating what I thought of the clerkship as a whole. I guess we get to see if it turns out to be reciprocal when my evals come in later on...

Last week on general

After a nice relaxing weekend, I had to come back to more general surgery. Mondays as usual, are clinic days, which I normally enjoy. However, today was just worse than usual. Clinic days are usually chaotic and completely unstructured, or absolute lessons in total inefficiency, but today managed to top that. Clinics should in theory run something like this: the rooms are filled with patients, us med students see the patients first and take histories to find out why they've come to see us, and then we present the patients to either the residents or the attendings who then see the patient with us to decide a plan or what should be done. Then the plan is carried out and things keep moving. This has yet to happen. Usually, we see the patients and then end up waiting around for someone to have a break in paperwork or whatever to see a patient for 30 seconds before going back to paperwork. I understand this is the system of medicine that we live in, especially at the VA, but what makes me upset is that even under this system they could handle the chaos so much better. They could easily work out a system to that at least one resident is always getting the patient work done while another is doing the computer and ordering work. And this would be on a normal day. Today, we only had one "physician" in the entire clinic, and most of the time he was doing something on the computer that had nothing to do with clinic work! We had all these patients to present and he wasn't seeing any of them. It forced us to get very very behind. Finally one of our attendings came and tried to fix the situation, but it just ended up in him getting very pissed off and flying off the handle yelling at people. It was not a good situation. He remained very cool at the med students though and we continued to try our best just to help out with what we could. It was just a very frustrating day. I'm glad it's my last week on this service. It's clear that surgeons know what to do in the operating rooms, but don't have a clue about how to run a clinic.

This week in review...

Blogger has been down a little lately, or perhaps just when I've tried to write to it, hence why the late update. Things were kind of up and down this past week. It didn't exactly get started off very well with some confrontations with people on my team. It was pretty much just differences in opinion, at a time when differences were not good to have. Particularly at 6 in the morning when some people had rather bad weekends. However, things have been worked out and the week got progressively better. I saw and took care of some very cool patients, did some more procedures and spent some more time in the OR. So all in all, it turned out ok despite a rocky start.

Tonight I hope to go out and have a little fun with my Saturday night off, we shall see how that turns out.

Washington on the Brazos

Kristi and I made it out to WotB again this past weekend to enjoy the amazing weather and check out the yearly wildflowers, as we did for the first time last year. I had heard they had been pretty scarce up to this point, but we managed to find some patches of really nice Texas Bluebonnets and Paintbrushes, as well as a few others spread out here and there. We took lots of pictures, and I put some of the best below. I'll probably put the rest up on a photo site like webshots or snapfish, so if you want to see the others just let me know and I'll send you the address.

Washington on the Brazos 2005

Me

Kristi

Feet

Flowers

A large Texas Paintbrush

Bluebonnets and Purple flowers

Close up on Pink and Purple Flowers

Field of Flowers

MSC Variety Show at Texas A&M

This weekend, I made it back to College Station just in time to see Kristi and her Swing Dancing performance team perform at the annual Memorial Student Center Variety Show and contest. The acts are usually always top notch as the groups usually spend months and months preparing their shows/routines, and this year was no exception. The performances were truly amazing, and of course naturally I was quite biased towards the the Swing Cats' performance. Some of the other notables included A&M's Percussion Studio, an elite group of about 30 percussionists who always are spectacular. This year they played a percussion arrangement to the hit song Clocks, by Coldplay. There was also hip-hop and tap dancing acts, and a solo pianist who will be going to Juliard soon. A mariachi group played, as well as the group that won from last year which was a band of students that play traditional folk instruments. The night was MC'd by Freudian Slip, A&M's band of improvisational comics that have made quite a name for themselves. A&M's Aggie Wranglers also performed which are known for Country and Western dancing and their high flying aerials which were showcased during the Austrailian Olympic Games. As I said earlier, all of the acts were very very good and when it came down to the judging I was worried that the Swing Cats might not place. When the awards were announced it was...

3rd: Aggie Wranglers

2nd: Percussion Studio

1st: Texas Aggie Swing Cats!

They won! We were all so excited and proud of them, me especially knowing how much hard work they put into their routine this year. It was really exciting.

The next day, they had a booth at Whoopstock where they got to show off their trophy and advertise for lessons. I got to go and help out, and got in a little of the craziness as well. Below are some of the pics.

5 of the Texas Aggie Swing Cats who won 1st Place Friday night at A&M's Variety Show Contest! Kelly, Ashley, Kristi, Byron, and Heather.

Kristi and Me goofing around at Whoopstock

Kristi, and yes she is taping up her well worn out dancing shoes. The hole went all the way through her socks as well!

So you want me to cut what?

So it's back to another week of General surgery, hard to come back after such a fun weekend. Monday was clinic day again so that's always busy, but this day I got called into the OR for a couple of cases as well. One case was incising and draining a rather large abdominal abscess, and they let me use the scalpel to make a rather large incision from which to work with. That was pretty cool. I also helped a lot with the rest of it as well. Pretty funny when you compare it to that new medical show on Sundays, Grey's Anatomy, where the new surgical interns (3 years ahead of me) are jumping with excitement just to hold a retractor. It's not exactly very accurate. Or at least the surgical interns here in Houston know what they're doing.

Today I did mainly floor work, but it was really really....... Really slow. There was nothing to do for much of the day at all. But they still didn't send us home until just recently... Oh well, food time... must eat and sleep as usual....

Saturday at the Beach...

I had this entire weekend off, so we decided to take good advantage of it. Kristi came down from College Station and we took off to go to the Beach at Galveston. Granted, it's not even close to being the best beach in Texas, but we couldn't afford much more than just a Satuday day trip to someplace closeby. However, it turned out really well. The two beaches we went to were pretty clean and sparsely populated. We got exactly what we both were needing. Some time away from the city, some fun in the sun, and a really relaxing afternoon.

We packed a picnic basket and took along Scout (the stuffed puppy Kristi gave me for Valentine's Day until I can get a dog of my own) and just made of day of it. The weather was amazing. Not too hot, with a nice breeze. We made our way out to East Beach first, which was actually a lot better than we were expecting any of the beaches in Galveston to be. Whenever we go back, I think we're just planning on staying out there the whole time. But on this occasiona, we wanted to see what some of the places south of the city looked like, and ended up spending 2 hours at such a location. It was nice there too, not crowded at all, but the sand wasn't as soft as it was on E. beach. We got some great seafood before heading back, a little tired and sunburnt. We also took some fun pictures to bring back as well. Some of which are below.