by Andrea | Dec 18, 2011
Friday evening marked the start of my winter vacation, but it was by no means the start of my preparations for the holidays and other festive winter activities. Since starting my psychiatry rotation, with it’s generous schedule and emotionally intense patient interactions, I’ve been doing lots of things to celebrate 1) being 2/3 done with M3 year, and 2) the coming solstice and all the holidays nearby. There’s been so much going on that it will take a few separate posts (some of which will be cross-posted on Dose of Reality, but most of which will only be on my personal blog).
First was the tour of the Parade Company workshop and warehouse. The Parade Company puts on the Detroit Thanksgiving Day Parade each year, and also supplies floats, balloons, and expertise to parades across the country and the world. Their facility is in an old car factory, which was apparently on the cutting edge of industrial design because there was so much natural light coming in through the overhead windows. (All of the photos should enlarge if you click them… If you’re a Detroiter, see how many floats and big heads you can identify in the pictures!)
You could still see the old train tracks where they came into the factory.
It is impressive to see all of the floats and balloons together, and I was particularly taken with the storage of the big heads in a gallery on the wall.
The big heads are a Detroit tradition, after some artists in Venice taught the Detroiters how to make them out of papier mache. Some of them are as light as 5 lbs, while others way much, much more.
Overall the tour was pretty incredible, and I have to thank Gary, my dad’s neighbor, for discovering the tours and inviting me along!
by Andrea | Dec 3, 2011
In talking to a friend about the weather last week, I realized how much of the seasons I’ve missed this year. While I’ve been so consumed with learning about medicine this year, the world around me has often been observed only through a layer of glass…
During the summer I was immersed in the long hours and overnights of inpatient rotations, and I often arrived at the hospital before the sun came up, and headed home as it was setting. I managed to miss the hottest days of summer this way, seeing the sweltering heat radiating up from the roads and sidewalks from the privileged position of the windows outside the operating rooms. I caught the tail-end of summer on my family medicine rotation, watching the sunshine stream in through my car window as I drove out to my assigned clinic location. I did take advantage of some free weekend time to enjoy the warmth and light, but it was already September and I was looking forward to fall. As the leaves changed and temperatures cooled a bit, I again found myself appreciating the vista from the OR windows during my week on neurosurgery, wondering if it would be inappropriate to bring my camera back (I decided it was) to capture the fall color as I was seeing it for the first time from inside the hospital. The last six weeks of the OB-GYN rotation have been some of my favorite weeks of medical school, and yet I couldn’t help but notice how drawn I was to the post-partum rooms on the 7th floor of Mott, with the long hallway of windows between the elevator and the patient rooms. When we followed our team for a quick tour of the labor and delivery floor of the new Mott, we all stood and marveled at the beautiful views from the patient rooms, watching the river meander through the falling leaves from the windows on the 9th floor.
And now somehow it’s really winter. Dividing up the year into 4-8 week blocks makes it really fly by, and I’m not sure how it’s the beginning of December already. We’ve gotten the first good snow of the season, and I’m looking forward to avoiding being out in it too much, as I’m starting my community psychiatry rotation on Monday. I’ll be enjoying the next 6 weeks of winter weather from the car.
by Andrea | Nov 16, 2011
I have to apologize for the long gap since I last posted here. It seems like the days are passing without my really noticing, so I’ll give a brief recap of the past few weeks…
I am loving my OB/GYN rotation! I had been hedging over the past 6 months since I hadn’t gotten to try it yet, acknowledging that I’d really enjoyed being in the OR during my surgery rotation, and that I liked the continuity on my family medicine rotation. I felt like I really couldn’t just say that I wanted to do OB/GYN when I hadn’t really gotten a chance to do it. Now that I’m here, however, it’s clear that the things I liked most about other rotations were the things that make up the core of this rotation. I think that most students have an ah-ha moment when they realize that they are rotating through their future specialty. I know that some have many such moments throughout the year and a few reach the end without one, but usually some elective time solidifies things and these moments present themselves, if later than your average medical students’ anxiety level would prefer. Here are a few examples highlighting how I know that I’ve found my place, in no particular order:
- Delivering babies is pretty cool. I think most vaginal births are pretty awesome, and as much as I wouldn’t wish a C-section on anyway, they are pretty magical in their own way. One minute, you’re in the OR cutting through skin, fascia, and smooth muscle, and the next minute there is a baby coming out of the incision!
- The surgeries on this rotation are some of the coolest I’ve seen. Fixing (or at least improving) incontinence surgically makes a huge difference for patients, and the anatomy is fascinating. I love that we still don’t totally understand how it all works!
- There is a strong research ethic, and the research program includes many of the social and economic determinants that I have come to know and love. I think I’d be well-supported! As much as I love “blazing trails” and “defining my own path,” I worry that in some fields those might be synonymous with “being completely alone and isolated” and “not getting any respect or funding.”
- The people I’m working with are engaging and entertaining. I have had really good experiences all year with both residents and faculty, so this doesn’t seem like an entirely fair thing to say; most rotations have featured an entertaining cast of characters, and this one is no exception. I like strong personalities, and they are present in abundance!
Suffice it to say I’m really enjoying these weeks, and am wishing I could stay longer…
by Andrea | Sep 16, 2011
As we near the end of the current four week rotation period, I’m realizing that we are nearing the end of the fifth month of M3 year. We are no longer early M3s, no longer the fresh-faced members of our inpatient teams, and no longer blissfully unaware of how far behind we set our preceptors in outpatient clinics. We’ve learned that being “on service” means working on a medical team in an inpatient setting, that getting someone “teed-up” means ordering all the necessary labs and imaging for the next step in treatment, and that asking whether there is “anything else that needs to be done” means that you’re ready to go home. I’ve also learned, and I can only speak for myself here, although based on lots of different conversations, I think it’s safe to say that I’m not alone, that I still don’t have any real sense of how I’m doing or what’s coming next. Over the course of a single day I can count both instances where I felt competent, well-prepared, and like I’d learned a lot on my previous rotations and those where I felt like I might as well have been some random person off the street for all I was demonstrating any medical knowledge in my presentations. As we start to get back feedback and grades (I say start because we’ve only really completed two whole rotations so far, and it takes 5-6 weeks to get grades) I’m also realizing that I’m probably somewhere in the middle of my class, and that by definition all but two of us are in the middle somewhere. There are things I’ve done well on, things I wish I done better on, and things I hardly remember doing (note that most things that occurred before about 5am fall into this category). I’m finding relative grading (that is, grades that compare you to classmates) a disconcerting change from PhD-land where everyone can be a superstar. I’m trying to move forward though, learning as much as I can along the way, and not letting the little hiccups get me down.
by Andrea | Aug 28, 2011
Last week as an informal addition to my surgery curriculum I decided to participate in the 2011 Fast-a-thon. In case you didn’t catch the short piece about it on NPR, the UMMS Fast-a-thon is a chance for non-Muslim medical students, staff, and faculty to fast for one day during Ramadan with the Muslim Medical Students Association. They organize a beautiful fast-breaking dinner at 8:30pm (this year – I think it’s much earlier when the 9th lunar month falls in the winter!) along with a program of speakers. I was not sure how fasting would work with my surgery schedule. I ended up being in clinic that day, which was probably for the best, and I discovered that I spent most of the morning thinking about the fact that I wasn’t eating. I didn’t feel very meditative, and I certainly felt awful for all of the patients on the floor that we had made NPO (read: nothing by mouth) that overnight in preparation for procedures later in the day.
As the day went on, however, I started to feel a bit more reflective. I realized that much of the eating I do during the day is purely social, and that even through the first six and a half weeks of my surgery rotation I had rarely experienced hunger. Part of this is because the operating room is as engrossing as it is consuming, but part of it is because I’ve already eaten several meals before the first case starts and can rest assured that I will eat again as soon as I get out. As clinic wrapped up and I started to feel a little irritable, I reminded myself that later in the evening I would have a delicious feast. I must admit I felt a little petulant as I complained to a friend about my hunger on a day during which I was supposed to reflect on global food shortages and my own relative position of privilege.
When the time came to break the fast, I wondered what it would be like to repeat this sequence of events every day for a month, or to be unable to eat after surgery waiting for the doctors to give the okay. To be honest, I still can’t imagine it, even after fasting myself for a day. But empathy, as Dr. Mangrulkar so eloquently pointed out during his reflections, doesn’t require that I experience exactly what my Muslim colleagues, or my patients experience, it is, according to Wikipedia, simply “the capacity to recognize and, to some extent, share feelings … that are being experienced by another.”
The big heads are a Detroit tradition, after some artists in Venice taught the Detroiters how to make them out of papier mache. Some of them are as light as 5 lbs, while others way much, much more.
