Busted!

Retroactive Post

My cadaver dissecting is coming along well. We didn’t get a whole bunch done last Monday, so I let my students know that I’d come in again on Friday, and if they wanted to join me to let me know. I didn’t get any responses back and decided late Friday that I didn’t need to go. So, after I dropped Cami off from work, I decided to go home. I got home and ate some leftovers and was watching TV. There was nothing on, so I decided to check my email and maybe I’d play the guitar a little. I checked my email and, lo and behold, one of my students said he’d be there. I had said I’d be there from about 6:00 to 8:00, and it was 6:30. I hopped in the car and sped over to the campus and no one was there. I wasn’t sure if the kid actually showed up or whether he was late so I just stuck around until about 9:15 digging around in some dead dude’s neck. (Ed. Note: The kid was in fact there from about 6:15 until 6:45 waiting for me, I felt pretty bad for just missing him, because I think he lives in Vacaville and commutes to school.)

At about 9:15, I realized I still had to clean up before picking up Cami, so I hurriedly put everything away and went upstairs to change my clothes and wash my hands and stuff. As I am walking out to the car, I check my phone and realize that I have few messages from Cami. I call her and whaddya know, she got done early and is waiting outside for me. It was starting to rain and so I told her that I would get there in about 10 minutes. Driving back to Woodland from Davis, I had to make a right turn on this little county road way out in the boonies. I was in a hurry and a car was coming, so I did a rolling stop and beat the car to the intersection. It was very dark and the car started to tail me. Then I started to get concerned, “Did I just cut off a cop?” He was following me closely, but didn’t turn on his sirens, and it was dark so couldn’t really tell if it was a cop at all.

Just at the moment where I thought I was safe, he flipped on his sirens. I was pretty annoyed. I don’t know if you’ve ever been pulled over, but they shine those lights in your rearview mirror so you can’t see anything. I got out my wallet and prepared for the worst. The conversation went a little something like this:

Tim: What seems to be the problem, Officer? (That is such the cliché thing to say, but, honestly, what else can you say? “So, Officer, did you nail me for speeding?”)
Cop: Remember that stop sign you blew off?
Tim: Daaaang it. (I am sure you can pretty much hear me saying that)
Cop: What was the deal? Did you just not see it?
Tim: No, I was in a hurry and was just trying to beat you to the intersection. (I don’t think you could have been more brutally honest)
Cop: You in a hurry?
Tim: Yeah, my wife got off work early and I just got out of the lab and was hurrying to pick her up so she wouldn’t have to wait outside too long.
Cop: Hmm… License and registration please.

At this point he went back to his squad car to run a check on my record, while I prayed the ticket wouldn’t be that expensive.

Cop: You still live in Merced, Timothy? (It was strange to hear him call me by name)
Tim: No, sir, I just moved to Woodland to go to school.
Cop: Since you’re new to the area, I’ll make you a deal. I’ll let you off with a warning if you’ll be more careful on these county roads, we get a lot of accidents because people run stop signs like that. You don’t want me scraping you off the asphalt, do you?
Tim: No sir and I really appreciate it. (Note to self: It pays to be brutally honest to cops)

So, in conclusion, I escaped the ticket. Which makes my track record, thus far pretty good. My whole life I’ve been pulled over four times, and thrice I’ve “talked” my way out of a ticket. That means that 75% of the times I get pulled over, I don’t get a ticket. An impressive statistic, indeed, but I’d rather not try my luck again any time soon. As soon as the cop left, Cami called and said “When you said you’d be here in 10 minutes, did you mean half an hour?” Cami, Cami, Cami…

In other news...

I followed Dr. Baron, my preceptor, around again last Wednesday. I asked him if it would be alright if I interviewed one of his patients on my own. He was running a little behind and said that’d be fine. So, I went in and talked to Ethyl, an old lady with a hearing problem. I asked what seemed to be bothering her. She replied that nothing was bothering her, she just came in for her regular check up. Great. However, she was 95 years old, so the more questions I asked the more I discovered she did, indeed, have some health problems. Turns out, she’s having problems seeing and can’t feel her toes. She’s eating and peeing all the time. So I start thinking, “Maybe Ethyl has diabetes.” I go and report my findings to Dr. Baron and he sort of looks at me and said, “Well, your differential diagnosis is pretty weak. What exactly did you want to get out of this experience anyway?” Ouch! When I told him I just wanted the experience of interviewing he said, “Oh, then I guess that’s okay.” I think he kind of forgets sometimes that I AM ONLY A 1ST YEAR MED STUDENT AND I DON’T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT BEING A REAL DOCTOR.

I will be a 2nd year student in a few short weeks and am afraid that people are going to start assuming that I actually understand a few things. Oh-ho-ho, are they going to be disappointed. Let's hope things eventually start looking up.

Cook Booking It

Retroactive Post

I started on Monday doing my dissecting. I was a little surprised to walk into the room and find tables full of severed body parts. I was given two body parts to work on—one severed head and one head attached to a trunk without arms or legs. I invited my group in with me and we all worked on the head together. I had forgotten how difficult it is to have to pry through all the fat and fascia associated with cadavers. I think my undergrad assistants were a little disillusioned with the whole process of dissection. It wasn’t quite as “romantic” as they might have presupposed. No, instead it was a lot of guessing (“Um… I don’t think that’s important, so we could probably cut it out”) and progress is slow. As a result, we didn’t do much more than skin the neck.

As a result, I went in by myself on a Friday night and spent most of the evening in a room with dead people. It was actually very relaxing (believe it or not) and I got a lot of work done. I was able to clean out most of the junk and fortunately, I was able to find the ansa cervicalis on the right side (a tiny little nerve that’s not too easy to locate). My hope was to get one side nice and dissected so that when my students come back on Monday I could say “See, we need to get this side to look like that side.” My plan should work and I am hoping to finish the front of the neck by the end of this week, even if I have to come in by myself again.

Cami started her new job this week. It has been nice to have a ride to school every day. She works 8:00 to 5:00, which is perfect for me to go to school. So we ride together. She is still working at JoAnn and so that means that some days she starts work at 8:00 at UCD and then finishes up at 10:00 at JoAnn. That is a long day, but, this week, every day that she is working late I’ve either been in Sacramento or doing late school work, so our schedules have been very cooperative. It remains to be seen whether or not this will be the case in the future, but I’m not complaining.

We found out last week that the school is not moving to Sacramento this summer as planned. Instead the big move is scheduled to transpire next January. Annoying. Last week we went to take a peek at the apartment of an LDS student who graduated, but his lease expires this summer and it’s no longer that convenient for us to move to Sacramento that soon, especially with Cami working in Davis. It would be silly for both of us to move to Sacramento if we were both driving to Davis every day. So, we’ll probably stay in Woodland until Christmas and then start worrying about where in Sacramento we want to move. In reality, I am a little happy that we aren’t going to be moving yet. I really like our ward here in Woodland and I like my calling and the people I work with and was already getting a little bit sad at the prospect of leaving so soon.

I don’t know if I’d mentioned it before or not, but California has been soaked these past couple weeks. We had 21 days of rain in March (a Sacramento record) and April has been fairly depressing thus far. However, for the first time in I don’t know how long, we had two consecutive days of partly cloudy skies. Our whole class didn’t know what to do with all that sunshine. To celebrate, on Friday we took the Ping-Pong Table outside and had and outdoor tournament.

Return Of Steve

Retroactive Post

I spent a good deal of time this past week realizing that I have A LOT to learn about being a doctor. Allow me to explain. In my Doctoring course, we’ve been integrating the interviewing techniques we learned in our first class with the physical examination techniques we learned last quarter. Instead of the musical chairs approach we took previously, each student gets a turn each week to interview our mock patient, as well as perform any relevant exams. Sounds easy? Well, no, I guess it doesn’t even sound easy. It was my turn to go last week. As luck would have it, my standardized patient was Steve, the world-famous anatomy model, the man who introduced me to the “anal wink” and farted on my friend Fernando.

He was playing a typical diabetes patient with numerous associated issues and it was my job to “see” him. I think I did a pretty horrible job. I have a hard time figuring out a good line of questioning and knowing when I’ve gathered enough information to warrant a change of topic. On top of that, diabetes is a disease with its grimy fingers in just about everything and I wasn’t sure what didn’t need to be tested. My classmates were in the room with me, watching me flounder and offering advice during my frequent “Time Outs.” To make matters worse, my pathetic display has been videotaped for my viewing (dis)pleasure. I have yet to actually watch the tape because I am afraid of being embarrassed for myself.

Since I thought I performed so poorly, I decided to go to a clinic today to get some practice on my technique. It was a good experience, but only reinforced my belief that I have a lot to learn about being a doctor. Sadly enough, one of the patients I saw was a diabetic woman who presented a case very similar to the one I had practiced on earlier in the week. Ready to learn from my previous mistakes, I set out to take a great history and physical. Unfortunately, the only one getting physical was the patient, who was furious that I was trying to test her numb feet. She hadn’t eaten all day because she needed to get some blood work done. Apparently, skipping meals put her in a cantankerous mood and she cursed me out in Cantonese (the translator was very embarrassed). In essence, she was getting angry at me for wasting her time by poking her feet when she was starving. Frustrated, I hurriedly finished my exam and let the old hag get her blood drawn. I think karma kind of took over from that point, because the guy doing the blood draw had to stick her three times to find the vein and then mistakenly removed the needle before filling enough vials. She will be back in two weeks to get the results of her labs and to get blood redrawn for the other labs.

In other news, this has been, meteorologically speaking, the most depressing spring of my life. March brought with it 20 days of rain, a Sacramento record, and April doesn’t seem to be letting up. Everyone is talking about the levees. Will they break? Will they flood? There has been significant flooding along the San Joaquin River and some parts of Sacramento seem to be particularly susceptible to flooding. The whole region is very concerned, and it seems the events surrounding the disaster in New Orleans following Katrina have gotten a lot of people worried about levees. Honestly, I didn’t even know what a levee was until last summer. I always thought it was a well, because why else would you drive “your Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry?” There is supposed to be another big storm moving through the area next week. I really can’t wait for it to start acting like spring… I am going through flip-flop withdrawal.

Oh, here’s some good news. Cami applied for and got a job at UC Davis last week. She is now a receptionist in the Events Planning Department where she has been doing her internship. This isn’t exactly what she was hoping for, but she does have her foot in the door now and word around the water cooler at work is that there are going to be a few job openings in the coming weeks and she’s the inside favorite to land one. Cami’s job is great for a whole bunch of reasons: A) I don’t have to take the bus to school anymore, because she’s working an 8:00-5:00 on campus, B) She doesn’t have to sub anymore and will get good benefits and C) I can’t think of another good reason, but I am sure there are plenty more.

Speaking of new jobs, I started my job as a dissector last week. I met my team and we’ll be dissecting the pharynx and strap muscles. This is going to be a little strange because we will be working on severed heads instead of a normal body. I guess the Body Donor Program doesn’t have enough dead people to give enough bodies to all of the undergraduate anatomy courses so we are trying to make as many bodies last as long as we can. I initially thought that I was going to have to dissect a whole body, but this is going to much easier and faster and makes the $500 a much more lucrative payment than I had anticipated.

I had a dinner last night at Dr. Brodie’s home in Davis. The ENT Student Interest Group held an informal Q&A with Dr. Brodie and some of the residents at UCDMC about the field. It was very informative and made me very much excited about the field. However, I am trying to keep an open mind about the types of medicine I am interested in. I don’t want to become so fixated one specialty that I don’t give others a fair shake. I am currently compiling a list of specialties that I would like, specialties I am potentially interested in and specialties I will likely avoid at all costs. Things I like include: ER, ENT, Radiology, and Ophthalmology. Things I am interested in include: Anesthesiology, Cardiology, and GI. Things I find icky include: OB/Gyn, Psychiatry and a lot of Internal Medicine stuff. Anyway, the experience at Dr. Brodie’s was a lot of fun (he has an awesome house), and I have arranged to watch one of his surgeries in a week or two.