August Newsletter

August brought my first audition rotation, on which I was trying to show off to the program director and other VIPs of an orthopedic residency program. This particular program is in Las Vegas, and it will be brand new when I graduate med school next year (May 19th, 2012). It was an interesting feeling doing an audition rotation. The knowledge that I might spend the next five years there made the experience sink in a little deeper. All in all, it was a good month and it went faster than I expected. The four weeks in Vegas ended on a high note when, on my last day there after work, I saw a woman helping a collapsed man and got to help get an ambulance and provide emergency care for him. I've been analyzing my actions so I can improve next time something like that happens and I'm trying to get a hold of the 911 recording to remind myself what all happened. The city communications person is not getting back to me on the matter, though.

My parents pointed out that this collapsing man was a good segue to my current rotation. Since August 29th, I've been doing emergency med. I like the diversity of cases that come through. I've seen a couple of patients who needed intensive care: a drowning victim and a patient with a STEMI. Other patients just need a pat on the wrist and are sent home, like a kid who had mild RUQ pain and a completely normal workup, and a psych patient who basically wanted someone to talk to and a bite to eat. There have been many patients filling in the middle of the spectrum, either. My only problem with EM is there is entirely too much medicine and too little emergency. I prefer the lacerations, fractures, etc. that can be fixed by slicing, casting, jabbing, or suturing. All this abstract stuff with lab values, liver function, body temperature, heart rhythm is too much for my concrete mind to wrap around. I'm improving, though. Each time I start a new rotation, it's taking less time to get in the swing of things. I am also getting better at general medical tasks like doing a complete H&P, which was a bear when I first started.
In the coming months, I have two more audition rotations set up. Sadly, they are both scheduled for October, so I'm trying to move one. In personal news, I am still struggling with my 30-year-old motorcycle. It's back in the shop, and I don't even want to think about how much it's going to cost to fix up all the little things going on with it. I swear, I should have been a mechanic. You make practically as much as a physician, don't pay malpractice out the nose, and your worst disgruntled customers are biker gang members, who mercifully won't sue you, and will resort to much more minor forms of retaliation like arson, murder, and the like. Anyway, once it's out of the shop, I plan on using it as my main form of transportation this month since it gets roughly double the gas mileage of my car.

Scott