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We can do this the easy way or the heart way

by | Aug 23, 2010

So it’s day #1, M2 year, everyone is more or less ready to get started, everything is in order, and WHAM!  I wake up Monday morning with the flu.  Scored a 103.1 that night.  Perfect.  I was also sick on my birthday last year for the record.  And the Ohio State football game freshman year.  So I wasn’t exactly surprised that this should happen to me.  But now that that’s over with, I can officially start my M2 year the right way.  And by that I mean in the library pretty much every day with lots of caffeine and very little sleep.  This year is going to be important though.  Now that we (should) know how a healthy body works, it’s time to learn about things that can go wrong, which after this first week, has been really interesting.  We started the year off learning about the cardiovascular system which is my current top favorite.  So that made this week a little less tortuous for me.  I feel more responsible for knowing this year’s material too–what we will learn will not only be tested on the boards, but is going to show up for the rest of our careers and will play a fundamental role in how well we manage the care of our patients.  In other words, it’s time to pay attention.  And with nearly twice as much lecture as last year that should be very challenging.  Oddly enough, this year feels less stressful.  (Disclaimer: it’s only been a week).  I think it’s because my study patterns have evolved well over the past year and I still make time to relax.  And, as I mentioned, learning this material is more like watching the History channel instead of local Ann Arbor public access government TV.  No offense local TV.  But really.  It’s great.

Fun in the sun. And by sun I mean lab

by | Jul 18, 2010

Hello again, I figured it’d be nice to stop in with some updates on the summer.  I can’t say anything really new has happened.  It’s been about 90 degrees every day the past week or so and the spiders in my apartment are starting to look like mice.  If you stand real still you can actually hear them chewing.  It’s weird.  I’ve been spending a lot of time in the lab though making some steady progress on my projects.  Running the experiments is the easy part–it’s the preparation and gathering of info and materials that has been consuming a lot of my time.  But I’m starting to gain some momentum now which will hopefully carry me until school starts.  Things will be really busy this week though–the next couple days I have to spend two night shifts in the lab watching over things, so it will be a night of Netflix for sure.  The past few weeks I did some shadowing in the operating room which was pretty exciting.  I saw several Cardiothoracic Surgery cases including a congenital heart defect repair.  The heart and lung cases definitely interest me a lot, and you can transplant them, which is another area of surgery that I’ve been interested in for quite some time now.  So we’ll see where I end up.  But for now there are 4 weeks left in summer.  My last summer ever.  And then Step 1 of my boards will be stalking me until the end of April, so life will be temporarily frightening for a while.  But that’s ok, right now it’s summer.  And there is a pool with my name on it that I must attend to.