Arkansas Children's Hospital, the place where I will spend seven of the next eight weeks, shown before the campus wide infiltration of construction processes with bulldozers and dump trucks.
Some would argue I have been neglecting my readers, few as they may be, by not having posted a blog in quite some time now. This may or may not be the case. I've been pretty busy - moving, finishing my first rotation, contemplating things, the usual. I have nothing phenomenal here to report, just an update on life.
So we moved into our house. Of course, everyone who reads this has probably already read it in a blog by Rachel first, so I don't really know what else to say. Now, we both promise, there WILL be pictures, perhaps a virtual tour, of the house up eventually. Give us time. Some say it takes a full year to get truly settled in and things the way you want them, but not with us. Three weeks (tops!) more is all we need. The twelve mile drive to and from the hospital every day has made me question, yet again, the utility of keeping my truck. A great vehicle, it really is, but at twelve miles a gallon, and two gallons a day, it will require a fill up at least twice a month, three times if it all falls on the right days. Let's see, seventy dollars a fill up, that's up to $210 a month for gas on a bad month. I know a car payment is a little more than this - but it may be worth it. That is, unless, I wanted to lease a car - but no thanks. I've been looking online a little bit and have decided I want to go with a either a Honda Accord or Civic, probably circa 2005 or so. We shall see.
In medicine, internal medicine is over. The board final was last Friday, followed by a three (and a half) day weekend - not a bad way to end it. It was all fine, I learned a lot, helped on a couple procedures, but I had long grown tired of it. Internists are obssessive compulsive; I am not. Patients would get daily CBS's (complete blood counts) and BMP's (basic metabolic panels) whether they needed them or not. We would end up finding petty little things wrong with the numbers and end up keeping patients a day longer than needed when they could have gone home and the numbers would have naturally corrected themselves. A patient could be receiving treatment for a community acquired pneumonia, improving substantially, and they would still want a follow up chest X-ray. In an acute enough time line, a chest X-ray will only show worsening, not improvement. As a general rule, the clinical picture of pneumonia improves vastly more quickly than the corresponding chest X-ray - the film may take several weeks to completely clear up, long after symptoms are gone. Now that I am at Children's, I can only speculate on how pediatricians will be. Many of them basically practice internal medicine for kids. And no, kids aren't just little adults, at least not medically, and must be treated totally different. But the logic, the process behind it all, can't be all that different. I guess we'll see soon enough. Today was just orientation - no introduction to the team or anything. It's probably just as well since we move around a lot more in peds. I start with four weeks of wards, two on the hematology/oncology ward and two on the general wards. This is followed by fall break, and then four weeks of clinics consisting of one week of nursery back at UAMS, one week of general pediatric clinic, and then two weeks of rotating through various pediatric subspecialty clinics which change daily. These clinics are even sometimes different before and after lunch - do allergy clinic before lunch and asthma clinic after lunch. Lot's of moving around. I'm anxious to work with kids, it will be a good change.
So I am officially an eye ball harvester now. To be more specific, a cornea harvester. Since I don't yet have my pager, I spent the weekend with my phone on just in case a case came through and I would be able to tag along and learn some procedural stuff. Basically, we go to these patients who have just passed away, have elected to donate their corneas, and have no disqualifying medical history, and take the eyes out. If the patient is outside the Little Rock area, God willing, the eyes are taken out and transported to us. Either way, once the eyes are in our hands, we take them to the lab and cut off the corneas and save them in a bio-supportive medium until they are needed. It's a daunting task dealing with something so little and delicate as just one part of the human eye, much less the whole thing. But then, I want to be an eye surgeon - better get used to it.
