Fun week this week. On Thursday, I volunteered to assist the Behavioral Science department as they test the 3rd semester students on their patient interview skills. Basically, we're handed a "script" of our chief complaints as patients, plus a bunch of past medical history and family history data. The 3rd semester students come in and interview us as if we were real patients coming to their office/hospital for the first time. There's a professor in the room with us to grade the 3rd semester students on their skills and give them feedback. After months (and months) of doing bookwork, taking tests, etc., it was nice to be in a setting where you can see the outcome of all of this. In addition, while I was acting like a patient, I was learning what I should be asking as a physician, especially as a prep for when I have to do this next semester. That reminds me: I need to copy down some thoughts before I forget them and the river of time sweeps me along.
Yesterday, I participated in a Neuroscience study that is examining the efficacy of simulator usage on medical training. Unfortunately, I was not placed into the group that got to play with the plastic "dummy patients," and I got put into a "reflection" group. I was concerned that this exercise would be a boring conversation, but I was completely wrong. The gentleman running the group was an emergency physician, and as soon as we were assembled and ready to go, he ran through a case with us: "You have a 52-year-old patient that's brought into the ER by EMTs, who report that he has a pulse of 50 bpm, O2 sats in the 80s, BP of 150 over 96...what do you want to do?" And we have to quickly ask the right questions and decide how to go about treating the patient: his O2 sats are way too low and he's registering below 8 on the Glasgow Coma Scale, so we have to intubate him; he's seizing, so we have to administer anticonvulsive medication (all we know about thus far is phenytoin); etc. The session was fast-paced, and the physician running the group was very demanding, asking us tons of questions. If we waffled, he'd keep grilling us. Lots of fun, and hopefully another good indicator of the work we'll get to do in the future.
Also, on Tuesday, I took a break from class with a friend from Bermuda named Janaya. We went to the capital of Dominica, Roseau, to watch a cricket match between Bangladesh and the West Indies. It was a ton of fun, and well worth having to make up a couple of skipped classes to go (all of our classes are videotaped and put on the web, so we can watch them at our leisure, although it's unwise to get behind). I didn't know anything about cricket beforehand, but this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me, and even for the locals here. It was the first international cricket match hosted by Dominica, so there was a national holiday declared to exhort the locals to come to the match! I'll have to check and see if there have been enough improvements to the network to allow me to post photos on the blog. If not, I'll add 'em to Facebook and my me.com account.
I admit that I made a bit of an ass of myself, though. Useful reminder for the future: if you get confused about which side of the body the spleen is on (it's on the left side, fyi, unless all of your viscera are backward, which is extremely rare), PLEASE don't correct someone loudly in the middle of a crowded room, like I did. You WILL feel stupid, and people WILL stare at you like your head has turned into a Mr. Potato-Head. Forewarned is forearmed, people.
Until next time, take care of yourselves and each other!
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