Off to Scott and White

Last night I finished my final shift in the Emergency Center at Memorial Hermann hospital in Houston and now I'm off to my second month of away electives at Scott and White Memorial Hospital in Temple, Texas. I'm especially looking forward to the comparison between the two hospitals and their two likely different programs in Emergency Medicine. It should be a fun month and I'm looking forward to it. Leaving Houston for a month will probably be kind of mixed. I certainly won't miss the traffic, the constant noise outside my window and some of the other problems with living in a major city, but being home is always kind of nice and leaving it for a long time gets a little hard. We'll see how it goes though! I will still have my cell phone and hopefully reliable access to my email and stuff while there. So I shouldn't be that hard to get a hold of if needed. I'll be back in Houston at the end of August.

The comings and goings of Emergency Med.

Wow, it doesn't seem like three weeks have already passed in this EM rotation at Hermann. I've really been enjoying this month so far, and they've definitely been keeping me busy. The last couple of days I've been spending nights in the trauma section. We've been receiving lots of car accident victims, assault victims including a stabbing where Dr. Duke ran the code amidst lots of excitement and activity, and I've been getting some very good practice on my suturing abilities. The residents and staff are all very cool and I've been learning some very helpful tricks of the trade from them which have really made some things very easy. I just can't believe the month is almost over already.

I had today off, which I used to polish my personal statement and Curriculum Vitae because I actually have my first residency interview in the morning. UT Houston grants a personal courtesy to their visiting students by letting them interview while on their away rotation. Although this really doesn't make a difference to me since I live in the same city, it's a great opportunity to get one interview out of the way already. It should also be great practice for when the real interview trail starts up this fall. I'm not planning on travelling too far though, alot of medical students interview and thus travel all over the country. I really just have the intention of staying in Texas, so I'm limiting my traveling to mostly inside the state. Once I get the interviews over with tomorrow, I work only three more shifts at Hermann, and then it's time to get ready for Scott and White in Temple.

Emergency Medicine at MHH.

Memorial Hermann Hospital

Today I officially began my emergency medicine rotation with UT Houston at their central facility, Memorial Hermann Hospital which also happens to reside in the Texas Medical Center. This is no change in scenery for me, as most of my schooling and work with Baylor just takes place right across the street, mostly. Still, it marks the first time I've ventured outside of the Baylor system, and also my first month of two of elective rotations in emergency medicine.
Mermorial Hermann is also home to world renowned trauma surgeon Dr. Red Duke who is well known for both the devlopment of helicopter assisted emergency rescue and transport, as well as his nationally syndicated nightly news health segments.

This morning in particular, I started off in a day shift in the pediatric emergency center, which was nice just coming off of pediatrics and spending some time in the Pedi EC at Ben Taub. The morning was slow--which they usually are--but things picked up around 10 o'clock and we started having patients. Overall, I really enjoyed it and I'm now really looking forward to what this next month brings.