Me. It's all about me here.

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NY, United States
My name is Daren. I currently attend LECOM in Bradenton, FL. This is currently my 4th year of med school. I created this blog to post my thoughts about medical school. And because I rock. Boom. So please, come make yourself at home and enjoy my musings. If you are easily offended by things (ie sarcasm, being politically incorrect, etc) then I suggest you evacuate the immediate vicinity :)

Sunday, April 14, 2013

On Family Practice

So I have just finished doing some grocery shopping at Sam's Club so I don't have to shop for the next 2 weeks. Except for milk... I haven't enough room in the fridge to hold another gallon of milk so that's something I have to buy regularly. A stocked fridge is a happy fridge. So now that I have everything under control and the water getting to a boil, I'll take a minute to talk a little bit about my last rotation: Family Practice. In fact, I'm going to post a blog about every single one of my rotations. Just because I want to. And because I know some of you out there do read my blog :)

So I did my FP rotation at Sisters Hospital in Buffalo, NY. Four weeks of... well... learning. Yes, I think that's the most appropriate term at this point. The entire team is filled with nice people. I have never before met attendings and residents who seemed so chill... well, most of them anyway. But indeed, it was filled with niceness almost to the point where you see rainbows and balloons coming out of each of their heads. My day would start depending on what time the attending feels like rounding in the hospital. If they want to start at 8am, I woke up before 5am (keep in mind it would take me an hour to wake up, get dressed, have breakfast, etc), plus an hour drive, then another hour to see my patient and write the note). If the attending started at 10am, I would wake up at 7am, which is much more reasonable in my opinion... but anyway...

I would go to the floor and look up my patient. Check the labs, data, etc, then see the patient, write up my plan, and wait for the attending to show up. Pretty routine. Sometimes they gave me 2 people to see and I would allot myself another 10 minutes or so, but usually it was just one. I had a good selection of run of the mill cases and a couple of more intense, cool cases. COPD exacerbation, HCAP in an elderly, CAP, pancreatitis... But I had a Steven-Johnson Syndrome case... felt bad for her, she was such a sweet lady going through so much. The hospital rounds varied greatly with time. Some attendings finished rounds with 6 patients in an hour, others would take 3 hours just to see 3. Whatever the case, the afternoons = go to jail. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. Go to clinic.

Clinic = doctor's office. Starts at 1pm. Where you either watch and be bored to tears, or you do history and physicals (ie yearlies, checkups, whatever you wanna call them) ad nauseum, or sit around and be bored. Or if you have reading material, don't forget that! Clinic ends at 5pm or 9pm, unless your resident or attending lets you leave early.

Or if it's your afternoon off, that's always a good thing. Thursday afternoon are either really awesome or really crappy, depending on how you think of it. All must be present for the DO day lectures/presentations on Thursday afternoons. That buys you a get out of clinic free card, but you're stuck in the hospital lectures on stupid things for the afternoon. Sometimes, they have free food from a drug rep or something. I'm agreeable to that.

Every week your senior resident or attending will probably ask you to present on a topic (not for DO day, this is typical when they ask you something and you don't know the answer and they tell you to look up the topic). Pretty short, 5 minute thing about some sort of disease. Probably a quick summary of clinical presentation, symptoms, diagnosis, labs, and treatment/management would be plenty. The good thing about these is that it forces you to relearn the basics about the disease process that you may have forgotten since step 1, and also that you put together the whole picture and tie it in to treatment with a real life case. I actually don't mind when they have me look up case topics.

So yeah, Sisters' FP residency program is supposed to be one of the better ones around here. So if you're looking into it, I suggest getting a rotation here if you enjoy the upstate NY area. I'd rather do Internal Medicine, so my interest lies elsewhere.

Oh, and my pasta was really good. Quinoa pasta toss with olive oil with spicy garlic alfredo and broccoli. Check it out: