In CS for Kristi's 21st B-Day

This past 15th was Kristi's 21st birthday, so of course I made sure to have the day off from the hospital to make it up for the occasion. I was actually able to make it up a day earlier than I was expecting just the way things happened to work out. Since Kristi is back with her parents for the summer we stayed at her cousin Jenny's place. We went ice skating on the day of her birthday since that's something that we both have been wanting to do for awhile. CS actually has a brand new ice rink, so trying it out was pretty convenient for the occasion. Afterwards we made dinner at Johnny Carino's because she had mentioned for a long time that she wanted to try the Bellini there (mostly cause she likes pretty drinks, ;-) ) We all ate waaay to much including the free birthday dessert. We had to let the food settle for awhile before heading to Northgate for the obligatory 21st birthday drinking fest. All in all, I'm quite proud of my lady. She handled it all pretty well, and kept managing to pass the "finger" test long after I thought she'd fail it. Lets see if I can remember: 1 long island iced tea, 3 shots including a tequila, a pineapple shooter she really liked, an amaretto sour, cherry vodka sour, and crown and coke. And she definitely took it all in stride, without much of a hiccup at all. I think I'm going to have to look pretty hard into exactly what goes on in all those Lechner parties.......



Getting ready for a night out on the town...



Me and Kristi at Johnny Carinos



K and her first drink of the night (a pretty drink as she calls it)



Matt and Gracie

Busy, Busy, Busy

So my first day on Medicine gave me a pretty complicated patient, that two and a half weeks later I'm still taking care of. She's what we usually refer to as a "rock". That's someone who comes onto your service and just stays there. Not sick enough to go to a intensive care service, and not well enough to leave. We've been finalizing a lot more of the aspects of her care that were on hold for awhile, so hopefully we're making progress on getting her sent to a more long term facility. My patients keep coming in pretty complicated though. I had a patient who came in with some fatigue and cramps, and it turned out to be Malaria! Then I had a guy come in to have some fluid drained from his belly and it turned out to be from liver cancer.... I guess it's good in that it's giving me some experience with that kind of thing. I just have a way of attracting the heavy stuff I guess. Oh well, Ben Taub hasn't nearly been the nightmare I was expecting and I did end up with a good team afterall and that makes all the difference.

Thrown into the Fire..

So I finished my third day of my three month Internal Medicine rotation this afternoon. It pretty much started off with baptism by fire as they say. We went through orientation and team meetings on Tuesday and found out who we're working with for the next month. I'm back at Ben Taub County General (sigh), but I think I'm going to have a good team. I'm with Vicki Feng again who was my partner on Vascular Surgery, so I already know that's going to work out fine. Our residents are pretty cool too so I think that aspect is going to be fine as well.

First Day: Our team was on call.. (double sigh). Ben Taub rotates 8 different medical teams on call on different days. Usually it's an every four day schedule with one team taking a long call, another taking a short call, and another taking a night call. Our team was up for long call, meaning that we had to admit the brunt of the day's medical patients and stay later than everyone else, well except for those that were coming on to be night call. I just admitted one patient, but of course it had to be the day's most difficult patient. I'm not really complaining. So far it's been a very interesting case and I've already learned an enormous amount about how to approach the care of a "medical" patient, as opposed to a surgery or specialty patient which is just about all I've seen up to this point. The past two days have pretty much just involved taking care of this one patient. So I think this rotation will work out just fine, it'll be a lot of work for sure, but I think it won't be as bad as everyone said it was.

Vacation over.

So here I am, last day of vacation is finally here. Tomorrow I start back in my clinicals with Internal Medicine. After getting back from Mexico, I didn't really do a whole lot until my 2nd weekend off. Jay finally got the call for his surgery on his knee, so that was performed on Friday. I was in College Station at the time on a day with Kristi that we had been planning for awhile, but I went home to help take care of him that night and next day. His surgery went very well, all except the post-op mess that happened because someone didn't get the discharge orders. But other than that it went well.

I did manage to have fun in CS though, we saw Bewitched, which is actually a pretty fun date movie. Even more so if you're slightly familiar with the old TV sitcom. We did some other random stuff as well, but it was a good day, especially since I hadn't seen her in about a month.

On Sunday, I left on my weeklong trip up to Amarillo to see my good friends, Wes, Sam, and Kelly from high school again. In order to make the trip more manageable, I stopped and stayed over in Waco with Kristi's family on my way up. Amarillo was fun, and I did a lot of just what I was hoping to do. Which was a lot of nothing. We went out a couple of times, managed to get a round of golf in at the local Par 3 course, as well as a game of bowling. We also played a lot of Halo since Wes and Kelly are into that now. I also managed to successfully infect them with the insane hilarity that is the Numanuma kid. It was really good just to see everyone again as well as get out of Houston in general.

On the way back, I spent the weekend in Waco again. Sam and Vicki had the kids up from Houston again and it's always fun to play with them. I got to see the new progress on the house and also have the kids play with fireworks out at the lake. The next day, we drove to Conroe to Kristi's dad's cousin's house. Dr. Gregg who is a local dermatologist has a nice country estate and was throwing a fourth of July barbeque for the Krenek family as a gettogether. The house was beautiful and everything was really nice. I got to meet more of her family and hear some more crazy Krenek stories. Food was good as well. All and all it was an interesting experience. I was really tired at this point and was just kind of ready to get back home and situated again. I had been away for a week and was really ready just to get settled down again. Which is good in it's own right as well.

So here I am, most of the stuff I needed to work on is done and I'm ready for tomorrow I guess. Orientation is at 8 which is where I'll find out which hospital I'll be in along with my teams. It will be interesting working with some brand new interns, so I'll have to keep writing with my experiences there for sure. So vacation is finally over... back to clinics!

Off to Mexico!

I realize that this is a looooong time in coming, but I'm finally getting around to write an entry after all this vacation time that I've been having since coming off of Neurology. So I think my test and everything went fine and it was litterally the very next day that several of us packed up and flew to Mexico to enjoy some fun in the sun. We flew down to Puerto Vallarta, which made the 2nd trip there for me. First time for everyone else, so I kind of had the advantage of knowing my way around, and where the cool things were. It was a fun trip, a very short one at that, but it was just good in general to get away. We did the whole walking around downtown thing on the Malecon (boardwalk), as well as eating in some of the local beachside eateries. We also spent plenty of time on the beach by the resort just relaxing and taking in the sights and sounds of the bay. I also parasailed! THAT was quite an experience, and definitely something to bring home and talk about. The view from high up in a parachute is just amazing! I didn't post all of the pictures I took, if you want to see them all just shoot me an email and I'll send you the link to snapfish, but the following are some of the notables.



This is a picture of our resort that we stayed at from the beach. It wasn't nearly as nice as the one we stayed in 2 years ago (which was just down the beach) but it was still nice and they treated us well. It was all inclusive and the buffet style food was decent. Drinks could have been a little better though but were still ok.



This is a photoshopped panorama of the resort. You can see a little bit more of it from here, not to mention that I just like to play with photoshop.



Some tropical plants and scenery around the resort.



Los Arcos (the arches) are a natural rock formation off the coast of the Bay of Los Banderos, where PV is located. They're a popular local attraction and scuba/snorkeling spot, and as such arches are a pretty common theme around PV. Our resort carried some replicas of some sculptures and arches found throughout the city and this is one of the such replicas on the resort grounds.




This is another angle of the arches, apparently this photo is a particular favorite amongst some of my friends as it's gotten some good remarks.



The beach was really nice and clean with lots of sand. You can't really see much of the surf in this picture but in some days the crests were really getting high.



This is a picture of the local landmark, The Lady of Guadalupe Cathedral in downtown Puerto Vallarta. It's a really beautiful church, and I would have taken pictures inside as well except that they were celebrating Mass at the time, and of course I didn't take any out of respect.



Simple picture of me in front of the church. We did so much walking around the city proper that day that most of my pictures were snaps on the go. Didn't really take a lot of me or any of the other people who went along.



This was one of the many sculptures and art pieces set alongside the Malecon. This piece was also replicated at our resort along with the arches from above. There was also a cool one of a tall ladder with children climbing up it and reaching for the stars. It's a popular one for people to have their pictures taken on while climbing it. I would have gotten a picture of it too, except I already had several from my last trip.




This is a view of the PV main beach right off the Malecon, the downtown district. You can see it's a much rockier beach than those by the resort. A lot of the rocks are actually popular for beachside vendors who make money by actually balancing rocks on top of eachother as "art displays". Some of the sand they also make into sandsculptures as shown below.




This was the main sand sculpture out on the beach while we were there. On the far left is an iguana with the caption, "Night of the Iguana" because that was the movie with Richard Burton directed by John Huston that made Puerto Vallarta famous and the tourist attraction that it is today. It was also the movie with the famous affair between Burton and Liz Taylor. You can still see and tour her house in the Downtown district. We tried but it was closed on the day we were there. There's also a very nicely done image of the Virgin of Guadalupe on the right as well.


So that was pretty much my trip to Mexico in a nutshell. It was short and quick, but it was a good get away and much needed after Surgery and Neurology. I'll have a little bit of vacation left before Internal Medicine starts now.