medical school

BOAK well then, that lamb curry can wait...

99 POOP BALLOONS

to add to the list of med school band names:

TOXIC MEGACOLON

I would listen to a band called Volvulus, unless they were prog-rock.

Additionally, a bunch of my friends play various medical school functions under the name "Palpable Thrill".

oh volvulus is a good one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZF9DLwKlb0

wowwwww someone's getting a call from the ~professional standards committee~

There is a really decent chance that two years from now, the schedule will work out today so that the 2012 class Match Day falls on the first day of the NCAA tournament. That will be like the best day.

btw did u kno it is

SPRINK BREANG TWENTY THOUSAND TEN YEARS OLD!???!?!?!!?????!!!!!!

Ugh so jealous! Ours is in a week and a half. I feel that NCAA tournament day 1 + Match Day should be a holiday at all med schools, though. It is such a joyous day! (Except at Vanderbilt, lol @ Murray St)

patient records can pass seamlessly from doctor to specialist to hospital, helping avoid the kind of dangerous slip-ups that cost the lives of an estimated 100,000 people in this country each year.

Are you fucking kidding me? A hundred grand A YEAR??

From NYT.

I think the classic number quoted (from an IOM study in 1999 called To Err is Human) is 98,000 per year, or "a jumbo jet falling out of the sky every day."

I dunno how that number has changed over the past decade or so.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand peace

went str8 to the gym swam for 90 mins came home bros on the porch drinking bears got sum indian food slept for like two hours listening to graceland going to see a friend dj 2nite fridge is full of beer all the windows are open and the breeze is coming in ~relaxed~

I AM DONE

lamp let's party

dude!!!!! on my 2nd beer already tbqf

wish u were here cuz its a p sweet time but may the next few weeks bring u nothing but happy trails and smoken climber chix ^_^ also u nvr returned my email about that book!!!!

Oh look here is what it looks like when I am envying u guys

Although to be fair today I finished my 2nd of 4 exams for this quarter, then went over to the undergrad campus where they had hella free food and a moon bounce. So today was rad but STILL, now I am back in the library trying to finish the final assignment for our terrible terrible ethics class.

yeah i have had two beers now already, and it is nap time

leaving tomorrow for Devil's Tower, if the weather improves

C-L: that is a bummer, man, hang in there

also wait did you send an email to my ilx acct? it is a dummy :(

*checks*

c-l, ive heard from both med and fellow pharm students that ethics class tends to suck, which is bumming me out cuz I was looking forward to it next semester

anyway 4 finals to go

Yeah at least for me, there are lots of well-meaning educational attempts throughout med school that are just so poorly done that they become incredibly frustrating, and Ethics was the most grossly inept of all. It was esp frustrating since I had the good luck in grad school to see the social sciences and medicine work well together, mostly driven by med anthro dudes who were big about resolving their fieldwork research with the day-to-day of medical practice. And then I got to med school ethics and it was just all absurd hypotheticals and vague platitudes with no takeaway for real life.

I cannot be the only person who wants to spend time during Standardized Patient exams trying to break the 4th wall, right? It is just so tempting to be like "It cannot be very fun to do this all day long for three straight days, can it? I hope they are paying you good." We kinda got to do this with the standardized genital exam patients last month though, which was cool. Apparently once you get over the whole finger-in-butt thing, a prostate exam just feels like someone touching any other part of your body.

In related news, I appear to be very susceptible to dropping the rest of a thorough H&P once I see an opening for potential diagnosis. Especially with standardized exams, where all answers will either be essentially "You have asked a correct question" or "You have asked for information I was not given". Basically once I get on a thread of correct questions it is like a shiny set of keys being jingled in front of me and I forget to be like "So do you have any family history of this issue" or whatever.

oh man I was pretty fast and loose with the fourth wall, esp when it came to doing mental inventories. I would just blatantly sidebar to run thru my checklist for the PE

also just did some major scheduling judo.

med 1
board studying/vacay
anatomy TA
ortho
surg1
peds
peds surg
spring break!!!
EM
fam med
~three weeks of mystery~
OB
away rotation
infectious DZ
med/peds
ultrasound!!
neuro
psych
med 2
intl rotation
...
profit!!

It loses a little something when you take out the giant "I <3 Hot Nurses" profile photo, but I am like 95% sure from the date of this openbook selection that this dude ran into my classmates after we had finished with Shelf exams:
http://i49.tinypic.com/mvt0zm.png

Step 1 studying is the f'ing worst, btw.

To address his claims: A fairly decent number, Yes, Some of them, Sort of.

so here we are, INTERNAL MEDICINE

first night of call tomorrow yaaaaaaaaaay

Dang you guys are already in 3rd year? Congrats!

T minus 8 hours to my Royal College exam. Written tomorrow, OSCE Thursday. Last hurdle after 9 years of medical training.

I'm optimistic.

you are fake

Fake what? It's real optimism. And it better be a real exam, the registration fees were ridiculous.

cool

hey do any of you guys know about the Bohr effect? I've been practicing Buteyko breathing lately and I don't know if it's the placebo effect or what but I feel my energy levels have been upped a bit by not breathing so much. also I went swimming yesterday and got fatigued less easily when I breathed after every third stroke instead of after every stroke.

I know of it, but tbh only as far as it takes to knock out the Hemoglobin curve questions on an exam (acidity and higher temperature and increased DPG concentrations shift the curve right, decreasing hemoglobin's affinity for oxygen! Increased pH and reduced temperature and decreased DPG shift the curve left, increased hemoglobin affinity for oxygen!)

Since increasing pCO2 reduces pH (with a 10 mmHg increase in pCO2 roughly correlating to a 0.08 drop in the pH, until metabolic compensation can retain enough extra bicarbonate to turn the drop into about 0.04ish), and reducing pH increases the dissociation of oxygen from hemoglobin, it makes sense that you'd be distributing oxygen more efficiently, but exactly how much of a difference this makes in a practical sense, I do not know.

(Note, everything in parentheses in this post was primarily written to reinforce knowledge that I should have going into Boards. Using ILX to study is fun!)

similarly, this is why free divers hyperventilate before attempting long dives: blowing off co2 induces a mild alkalosis. your body actually polls the co2 levels in your blood, not the o2 levels, so lowering them by breathing heavily will give you more time before the drive the breath becomes overwhelming. the trade off is that if you blow off TOO much it's possible that you'll pass out from hypoxia underwater before yr brane says "surface now!"

also congrats to plasmon! tho I thought you were in the states?

similarly, this is why free divers hyperventilate before attempting long dives: blowing off co2 induces a mild alkalosis. your body actually polls the co2 levels in your blood, not the o2 levels, so lowering them by breathing heavily will give you more time before the drive the breath becomes overwhelming. the trade off is that if you blow off TOO much it's possible that you'll pass out from hypoxia underwater before yr brane says "surface now!"

― gbx, Wednesday, May 26, 2010 2:01 PM (2 hours ago)

yep i've had similar examples given in class about runners, too

so much better at using my freetime now

or at least appreciating it. drinkin a beer post-call after a v satisfactory mid-course eval seems like a decent way to wind down the day imo

Thumbs up, gbx.

I passed my exam. Just goes to show that if you work hard, hold on to your dreams, and bribe all the necessary officials, you can accomplish anything.

Now I'm officially a neurologist. In the words of someone Roger Ebert recently on his blog, I'm trying to figure out what I can do with that. So far the answer seems to be: I can fill out paperwork and pay outrageous licensing and membership fees. I'm sure that horizon will eventually stretch a little further.

First day of the rest of my life, etc.

congrats plasmon!

yeah way to go!

Congratualtions, could you come and rewire my brain so that I am not repulsed by bananas?

USMLE Step 1: really almost a pleasant kind of thing to actually take, after many many terrible weeks of prepping for it with Kaplan yelling at you like "Oh man the USMLE is gonna GET YOU, you don't even KNOW." It is also extremely pleasant to be done with it. Hopefully my score is OK.

Postscript: My score was OK.

Three quick notes on OB/Gyn:

1) There is nothing more awkward than observing a pelvic exam. Doing a pelvic exam is actually pretty OK, once you get past the "I can use this speculum correctly without causing severe unnecessary pain to this lady" phase. But observing a pelvic exam, where it is you peering over the shoulder of the attending looking at the patient's cervix and being all "Oh yeah that is an acetowhite lesion right there", while you can also see the patient's nervous/uncomfortable face looking back at you? It is seriously like a transcendent kind of awkward.

2) Urogynecology: secretly this is awesome.

3) Whoever designed the OB/Gyn Shelf exam the NBME distributes so everyone can take it at the end of the clerkship should be fired, or possibly shot. That was an exam where like 30% of the questions related to things you can actually learn in the course of a clerkship, and then like 70% were some crazy off-the-wall BS. Poor evaluations of actual acquired knowledge drive me up the f'ing wall.

what's up gbx, how was that big exam? we've missed you around here for real

i coulda used a month off too, fuck these recent immuno and psych exams

i mean not that ilx had been interfering with school (i havent posted much besides whining in politcs threads and voting in rap polls) but still

sup the rest of my future heath care pros, C-L, gbx, plasmon etc