Busy week!

This week has been non-stop. Yesterday was long but fulfilling in so many ways. I woke up at 6am and lay there in bed for a good 3-5 minutes weighing the pros and cons of going to Trauma Conference before class. Somehow I forced myself up and jumped into the shower, which helped. Trauma Conference is a weekly teaching point where presentations are made about various trauma cases that have come into OHSU recently. This week, there were two motor vehicle vs. pedestrian cases and one where a man came into the ER with GI bleeding due to a rare surgical weight loss procedure done several years before. It was called a Salmon procedure and it apparently helped him go from 560 lbs to 230. Dr. Salmon, from Eugene, pioneered the procedure but has since fled the country or something to that effect.

Class was long but interesting. We went over the abdominal cavity so now I have a little understanding of how those organs function and their relationships to each other. Lab today was the spermatic cord and the testis. Soooo glad we had a female, I was cringing at just the thought of slicing through the scrotum and cutting a testicle in half.

During our lunch break, I went to an elective course for Greek/Latin medical terminology, or something like that. It was interesting but I was zoning out pretty hard core. Then we had Principles of Clinical Medicine 1-5pm, which we do every Wednesday. We had a lecture on the BATHE technique, another one of the million acronyms they expect us to know...it's about empathizing with the patient and making sure they can air any of their concerns that may not necessarily be medically related. After that, we learned how to do a basic heart exam with the stethoscope. Its nice knowing how to actually use it, since that's kind of our go-to tool and what everyone expects us to use!

At night I went to the Atul Gawande talk on medicine and health care reform. I read his book Better and he used some of the same stories in his talk! He's a casual, simple speaker and it was a pretty engaging talk. A lot of his talk was about how to make medicine better. My friend Leanna went with me and we had a good time.

So my day pretty much lasted from 6am-11:30pm. I am in Medicine after all so I better get used to it right? :)