by Shannon | Aug 18, 2012
Hello! It has been FAR too long since I last wrote, and I guess the only excuse that I can proffer is that med school has felt like a whirlwind these past few months. Since I last wrote, I finished my third year, enjoyed an amazingly relaxing two week vacation with a cruise to the western Caribbean, entered my fourth year with three busy and very different rotations, took the USMLE Step 2 exam, and then hit the pause button on M4 year to start my research year in the lab. Needless to say, I feel like I’ve been going nonstop this summer!
Although I’ve only experienced a small taste of fourth year, I can already say that it lives up to its reputation as being the best year of medical school. Unlike third year, in which we have to complete seven required clerkships with no time for electives, we have complete flexibility in picking our fourth year schedule, and get to take only rotations that we’re really interested in. I started the year with a cardiology subinternship. I had rotated through cardiology early my third year and loved the rotation, so I thought I’d do it again as a fourth year, especially since at the time I was still undecided between internal medicine and otolaryngology. It was a great month, and I learned a ton about managing patients as a sub-I (where, unlike as a third year, the patients really feel like your own, as you have no intern working with you and thus are the one who puts in all of the orders and gets pages when issues arise). This month was probably as steep of a learning curve as starting my M3 year, but by the end of the rotation, I felt significantly more confident in managing patients.
In June, I did an ENT elective, and loved just about every minute of it. I got to rotate through pediatric otolaryngology, audiology, laryngology, and the head and neck cancer service, and each week felt like an entirely new rotation, with an amazing diversity of surgeries. I especially enjoyed the pediatric rotation, as the surgeries tend to be quick and gratifying, and I love working with children. The department is small, so I felt like I really got to know the residents and attendings, and the rotation solidified my decision to apply into otolaryngology next fall. I’m already excited!
Beautiful Caribbean sunset on my post-M3 cruise!
I ended part one of my fourth year with a pathology rotation. My father is a pathologist, so I thought it would be fun to learn a little more about what he does day to day. There is also a large interplay between pathology and surgical fields, as the specimens the surgeons remove are sent to pathology, who then quickly call back with the final diagnosis. The rotation—which espouses a “self-directed learning” philosophy—was more relaxed than the previous two, allowing me to see various aspects of the field I found interesting, while also giving me some free time outside of the hospital. I used this time partly to study for my Step 2 exam, which I took last week (for the younger med students out there, don’t worry; the process is far less painful than studying for Step 1!)
The day after I took Step 2, I jumped right into the lab. I’m working with one of the otolaryngology attendings, looking at head and neck cancer stem cells and their regulatory factors (I’ll spare the details on this for now at least!). There are about ten other people in the lab, and everyone has been very welcoming and helpful, as it’s been about five years since I’ve worked in a lab and am definitely a little rusty! After just two weeks into my research, I can already tell that it’s going to be a great year, and I’m so happy I decided to do this research program.
I guess that sums up what I’ve been up to in these several months that I’ve been negligent in blogging. It’s been a beautiful, though hot, summer in Ann Arbor, and it’s been wonderful having some downtime to take advantage of all the outdoor activities the city has to offer this time of year. And, most excitingly, today marks the two-week countdown until the kickoff of the Michigan football season—a season opener that promises to be memorable as we take on the defending national champions, Alabama, down at the Cowboys Stadium in Texas!
by Shannon | Apr 15, 2012
46 weeks down, 2 to go. It’s hard to believe that’s all that remains of M3 year—arguably the most feared, most challenging, but also most exciting year of medical school. As I sat in our weekly seminar this Friday, entitled, “Preparing your residency application,” I realized how far we’ve come since last May. I find it truly hard to believe that it was only eleven months ago that we left the lecture halls and entered the hospital, a time when everything felt so incredibly new and foreign.
I had been told that the learning curve of M3 year is incredibly steep, but it is only now at the end of the year looking back that I appreciate just how much we’ve learned over the last eleven months. In just a few weeks, many of us will begin our fourth year with sub-internships, rotations in which we have less oversight and more direct patient responsibilities than we did as M3s. I am sure there will once again be a challenging transition as we begin to function more like interns, though the rigorous third year has provided a strong foundation for doing so.
It is exciting to hear more and more of my classmates declaring (or at least hinting at) what they are going to apply into, and I’ve noticed a definite transition from school-centric to career-focused thinking and discussions. As I mentioned in my last post, I am taking a research year off, and have therefore delayed this process a little, but I am still excited to complete the milestone that third year represents and to experience a few M4 rotations before entering the lab.
Since I last wrote, I have completed my family medicine rotation, as well as the first half of neurology. I was based in Chelsea for family medicine, a quaint town about 15 minutes outside of Ann Arbor. It was refreshing to get out in the community after numerous back-to-back rotations at the University hospital, and I really enjoyed the fast-paced and outpatient nature of the rotation, as well as the abundant one-on-one teaching time with faculty. I am now on neurology at St. Joe’s, a private hospital in Ann Arbor, and I am surprised by how much I’m enjoying the rotation. It’s great to see an entirely different hospital system, and I must admit that I have been surprised by how attentive and teaching-geared the attending physicians are to the rotating students. It is definitely an interesting and relatively low-key month to end the year on!
Today was the Big House Big Heart road race, an annual event that races a bunch of money for local charities. Best of all, it ends on the 50-yeard line of the football stadium (hence the name of the race!) with the Michigan fight song blaring, which—though I may be slightly biased—has to be one of the best race finishes to a road race there is! I did the 5K race, the shorter of the two distances, but I haven’t raced in quite a while, so I’m definitely feeling it right now!
I’ll check back in soon, hopefully on the two week break we have between M3 and M4 year! In the meantime, if any applicants or admitted students have questions before final decisions are due, feel free to email with any questions! flynns@umich.edu
by Shannon | Feb 19, 2012
Hello everyone! I was studying this morning and realized mid-question that it has been far, far too long since my last Dose of Reality blog. Between the whirlwind of the holidays and my new clerkship, I really have no idea where the time has gone! My holiday break was really wonderful…it was so nice to go home and spend time with friends and family. I spent Christmas in Connecticut, made a couple of short trips to New York City and Philadelphia to visit college roommates and my sister, and then rang in the New Year in sunny, warm California on a trip to Disneyland with my little siblings (so fun!). With all the traveling, the three weeks flew by, but it was still a wonderful, refreshing break after completing the first two-thirds of my M3 year!
New Year's Eve at Disney with my little brothers
School started back up with a bang, as I jumped right into my surgery rotation. I’ll admit that I entered this clerkship with a more than a little trepidation. Surgery is arguably the most physically demanding and time-consuming of the seven clerkships we rotate through our third year, and I wasn’t sure how I was going to handle the very early mornings and long hours of standing in the operating room. I’m now six weeks into the rotation, and I can honestly say that I am loving it! I started off on the surgical oncology service, where I saw lots of breast cancer surgeries and melanoma removals. I’m now on thoracic surgery, which has been really amazing so far. The hours definitely are the longest that I’ve encountered all year, but there is something so exciting about the hands-on and very technical nature of this rotation that makes the time fly right by. I have struggled a little finding adequate time to study, sleep, work out, and relax (sadly the latter two have gone by the wayside a bit these past two months), but overall this clerkship has been a really positive experience, and I will be sad to see it end!
In other news, I have decided to take a research year off between my third and fourth years to do research in otolaryngology. I’ve been considering ENT as a future career for the past year and a half or so and was waiting to see what I thought of my surgery rotation. After enjoying it as much as I have, I’m now leaning toward this field, and I’m excited for a year off not only to do lab work, but also to learn more about the field and solidify this decision. I can’t wait to get started!
Alright, my stack of surgery question books is calling my name once again. My apologies again for the delay since my last post and I promise to check back in again soon! I finish up M3 year with family medicine and neurology and am very much looking forward to having a little more downtime and weekends off once again…until then, enjoy what hopefully continues to be a very mild winter!
by Shannon | Dec 12, 2011
Greetings, and happy (almost!) holidays! I am writing this from the pediatrics team room, midway through my second of four night shifts. It’s 3am and I am running high on caffeine and sugar from the large bowl of holiday Snickers on the conference table, but rather low on sleep. With that in mind, I apologize if this post has an element of delirium to it!
Since I last wrote, I have completed the bulk of my pediatrics clerkship. There have been several highlights—not the least of which included a glorious four-day Thanksgiving break—and this will definitely be a rotation that I will be sad to see end. I have spent the second half of the rotation inpatient, on the hematology/oncology team. Hem/Onc was my favorite sequence of M2 year, so I not surprisingly found this month to be one of the most clinically interesting thus far. It goes without saying that many of the patients are very ill, which my fellow students on the team and I struggled with on a daily basis. That being said, the optimism and resiliency in many of the young patients was incredibly inspirational and gave much meaning to the rotation, far beyond the interesting diagnostic workups and treatment regimens.
I spent several afternoons making fleece blankets with one of my patients, a young girl with a recent relapse of leukemia. On the third day, I asked if the blankets were for different rooms of her house or if she was going to give them as holiday gifts. She answered that they were part of a fundraiser for a charity she has recently started for childhood leukemia. Beaming with pride, she told me that she had already raised $120 and hoped to double that with the blankets we’d been working on. I looked at her in amazement, not only by her generosity, but also by her modesty—so far beyond her years—in not having told me this on her own. I watched her focus as she meticulously cut and tied the small strips of fleece, and her delight as she folded each newly finished blanket. There was no anger that she had to spend Thanksgiving in the hospital, no self-pity that her hair had been falling out in large clumps over the past three days. Though it might sound cliché, in the high stress and demanding environment of third year, it is moments like these that truly put everything into perspective and remind me exactly why I am here.
The halfway point of my time on the heme/onc was marked by a very exciting, monumental day for the Mott Children’s Hospital: the opening of the new hospital! Over the course of just several hours, over 200 patients were transported along an 800 foot, indoor pathway between the old and new hospitals. This feat is made even more amazing when you consider the multitude of devices and machines that many of the patients are attached to. The move of the heme/onc floor was scheduled to start at 2pm. Like clockwork, our first patient entered new Mott at 2:02pm surrounded by a team of nurses and physicians, and another patient arrived every 3 minutes until our whole service was safely tucked away in their new rooms. I was amazed by the smoothness of this massive undertaking, which was planned down to every last detail. I feel lucky that I happened to be on my pediatrics clerkship on the day of the big move, as it is definitely something that I will remember!
Alright, I have been told it is time to stop writing, as it is time for a stair workout. The new hospital has 12 floors with several entirely glass-encased staircases that give amazing views of Ann Arbor. I’m not sure how my body will cooperate with that many flights of stairs at this hour of the morning, but I’m sure it will serve as a nice energy booster (last night we found the hospital’s football-inspired play room and had way too much fun running around in it). I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday, and I will check back in when I return…at which point I will be in the land of surgery!
by Shannon | Nov 3, 2011
Hello again! I will begin with an apology, as it has been far too long since my last blog post. Somehow, the eight weeks of internal medicine that I had remaining when I last wrote passed by more like two or three, and it’s hard to believe that I now find myself in my second week of pediatrics, with another clerkship under my belt. More amazingly, with the completion of our shelf exams last Friday afternoon, my class hit the halfway point of our third year of medical school (!!), a somewhat terrifying yet very exciting thought.
Things have been very good—though very busy—here since my last post. I completed my month of outpatient medicine, which I feel gave me the broadest exposure to different medical conditions that I’ve experienced so far this year. I really enjoyed the significant amount of one-on-one time with different faculty members—a luxury that the busy inpatient world does not really allow—and I felt that this was a great month to practice my oral presentation and clinical management skills.
I next moved on to a general medicine month at the VA. I had heard that this rotation is a “love it or hate it,” type of month, and I assumed that I would fall on the “love it” side of the dichotomy. I must admit, though, that I think I fell somewhere more in the middle. I really enjoyed the autonomy of the month (med students are allowed to write notes at the VA), and I felt that I had ample time to get to know my patients, which is one of the more rewarding aspects of being a medical student and having fewer patients to focus on than the residents and attendings. However, I struggled with the severity of the illnesses of most of the patients on the service, many of whom presented with end-stage disease and very poor overall health, often from preventable causes and a lack of resources. This is certainly an inevitable aspect of medicine, and in fact one that drew me to the field; I just found it difficult to have nearly every one of my patients so ill, and I struggled with some of the patients’ stories when I left work many of the days.
Enjoying Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia with my sister on a much-needed switch weekend!
Following the completion of my internal medicine shelf, I flew out to Philadelphia for the weekend to visit my sister, a recent Michigan med school grad and now pediatrics intern there, as well as some college friends. It was really nice to get out of Ann Arbor for a couple of days, to enjoy the beautiful city and weather, and—best of all—to not have to study for anything! I flew back Sunday night feeling recharged and ready to move onto pediatrics the following day.
I’m now ten days into this rotation and am really enjoying it so far. I started on my outpatient month, so I’ve gotten to rotate through the Newborn service (adorable babies, very few medical issues, and happy people all around), as well as a few days of subspecialty clinics. I end the rotation on the hematology and oncology service, which is something that I’m both really excited for, as well as a little nervous about, as I know it will be difficult to deal with severely sick children, especially around the holidays.
It’s hard to believe that it’s already November, though the gradual yet definite drop in temperature lately suggests that winter is not too far away. I promise another post before the holiday break, but because late November will be here before we know it, I hope everyone stays warm and has a great Thanksgiving!
