Deal or No Deal?

So, I am in a bit of a pickle.

I start my third year of medical school this summer. The third year of school is drastically different from the first two years, as students leave lectures and bookwork behind, to tackle the wards of the hospital. At UCD, every student is required to cycle through 6 required rotations, namely: Surgery, Internal Medicine, Ob/Gyn, Pediatrics, Psychiatry and Family Practice. While the order of these rotations doesn't really matter, there is some benefit to doing some rotations early or deferring some required rotations to your fourth year to do elective rotations (especially if your desired field is a very competitive one).

My problem arises due to a curricular change at UCD SOM. The school decided to switch from a quarter system to a semester system, starting with the current first year medical students. This means that the class below me starts and ends their academic calendar at an earlier date than the classes above them. The problem is that the current first years will start their required third year rotations before my class has completed them. This means that the hospital will have to accommodate twice the number of students on the wards for one rotation block. To ease the strain, the school is requiring 75% of my class to defer our last required rotation to our fourth year, so that the class below us can begin on time.

Without going into too much detail, I've been assigned to defer my Ob/Gyn rotation until November/December of my fourth year. Unless you actually want to be a gynecologist (no thank you), that's a great rotation to have to defer. However, completing the course in the middle (as opposed to the beginning) of the fourth year is a problem. Residency interviews and internships take place during the winter of the fourth year and I'd have to miss significant portions of a required rotation to do that. In order to make up missed time, I'd have to take on extra call and weekend shifts, and worst of all, I'd have to delay taking my Step 2 Board exams for about 6 months (Ob/Gyn is heavily tested).

Since 25% of our class doesn't have to defer, we have the option of "taking my chances" in a lottery of sorts. All those who don't want to defer are being placed in a lottery for the right to complete their third year in the normal fashion. Currently, about 30 students are in this lottery and roughly 20 of them will be able to opt out of deferring a rotation. The other unfortunate 10 will be forced into deferring either Internal Medicine or Surgery, either of which would seriously hurt your chances of getting into good residencies in those fields (pretty much everything but psychiatry). It's risky business, but the odds are in your favor that if you opt for the lottery you won't have to defer.

I am interested in ENT, a surgical specialty, and would not want to have to defer my surgical rotation. Deferring medicine is ridiculous too, because it's such an important rotation. However, my current situation isn't ideal either. So the question is: Do I opt for the lottery and accept a 66.67% chance that my gamble will pay off and I'll get everything I want? And am I willing to accept a 33.33% chance that everything could be ruined? Or do I play it safe and keep what I have and just deal with the annoyance and extra work it will cause? What would you do?

Deal or no deal?

March Madness

This is the first blog that will be decorated with pictures from our new camera. We cashed in our credit card rewards points to buy ourselves a Canon Elph. It's the brand spankin' new version of our old Elph, with a few more bells and whistles. It's been fun to play around with it and learn about the new features, but I suppose at the end of the day, a camera is still a camera.

I had my last exam of the quarter Friday afternoon. It wasn't easy studying for neuro exams with the NCAA tournament going on. I filled out a couple brackets with some of my friends and was trying to keep up on all my picks. Though I enjoy filling out brackets, I'm absolutely horrible at it. I'm currently sitting near last place in my group. The good news is we aren't playing for money. Clearly, I'd never make it as a bookie in Vegas. Worst of all, true to their nature, BYU bowed out of the first round of the tourney with a loss to Xavier. It ain't always easy being cougar blue.

After my exam on Friday, Cami met me in Sacramento for dinner at a little restaurant called Crepeville. We had some crepes and a little dessert with Sean and Ashley before heading over to the UC Davis MIND Institute for Mirth Control '07. It was a lot of fun to watch the skits/videos that each class put together. Everyone did a great job and good times were had by all. Our video went over pretty well, but we didn't take home the prize. Which wasn't that surprising because some of the other classes had some really awesome presentations. The only complaint of the evening was that there just wasn't enough room for the large audience. Well, that and the fact that one of my professors went a little overboard with his own skit. Let's just say raucous laughter was replaced with that uncomfortable "did he really say that?" nervous sort of laughter. All in all, it was a good evening.

O Positive

Little known fact: It used to be a goal of mine to join that prestigious society known as the 25 Gallon Club. I used to give blood in high school and college and I stumbled across the organization while munching on post-donation cookies. The only requirement is that you have donated at least 25 gallons of blood in your lifetime. A few simple calculations reveal that membership in the 25 Gallon Club is quite an accomplishment. A blood donor gives one pint of blood per donation. There are two pints in a quart and four quarts in a gallon. You have to wait 8-12 weeks between blood donations, which means that in one year you can donate two quarts of blood, or half a gallon. Assuming you continued at that rate, it would take about 50 years to donate 25 gallons of blood. That's a lot of blood.

I was a very regular blood donor until they told me that my blood was no longer acceptable. Sadly, my time spent in Germany disqualified me from donating blood because I may have unknowingly contracted Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, more commonly known as Mad Cow Disease. Rather than potentially infecting needy recipients with the prions I could have floating around in my brain, blood banks put an indefinite moratorium on my blood donations. Alas, my quest to donate 25 gallons was frustrated before I even reached one.

To my pleasant surprise, I discovered today at our campus blood drive that the requirements for giving blood had changed. In order to be denied the opportunity to give blood, you have to have spent more than five years in Europe since 1980 or more than three months in Europe between the years of 1980-1996. Since I only spent two years in Germany from 2000-02, I was cleared. I am happy to report that, according to my calculations, I donated my seventh pint today. Today's donation puts me in the not so prestigious 7/8ths Gallon Club, but I guess it is still an accomplishment of some sort.

I anticipate being admitted into the 25 Gallon Club sometime around the year 2056. Sure, it's a long way off, but it's nice to have a long term goal. Besides, even if I don't make it into the club, at 75 years old, I just might be senile enough to not even remember the goal in the first place.