Talk about a hiatus!

Well I seriously haven't posted in a loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong while. It's ok, cuz I think I might be the only person who reads this (as I write this). HOWEVER, it is time to get back to it!

In shortest-of-all-recaps, Psych was great. It was very emotional to deal with teens who were so low that they constantly cut themselves, restricted food, and tried to kill themselves. But you could see what is basically a rescue occurring right before your eyes---adjust their internal chemistry, get them to open up and talk about their struggles, have them complete goals for the day, encourage working on the goals and good behaviors, etc---and you can really pull them out of a crisis. What was even better was to watch the continuation of the therapy in an outpatient partial program where they'd have therapy plus some school. My favorite is always Group Therapy times. These kids constantly surprised me with their insight into each others' illnesses and struggles, and their support for one another was seriously touching. But parents often made me mad. I'd say 75% of the kids' problems involved the parents' having problems in one way or another. It just about drove me insane. After my hardest day, I just had to say F it and go to the mall.

So for the past 3 weeks I've been on outpatient/ambulatory Medicine. Something new for our class. It is code for "vacation," what with maybe 4 half-days a week spent in one specialty clinic or another, and seemingly more half-days spent in lectures (some better than others). And then there's the FULL DAY OFF. I've had 2 of them so far. Did I study during them? Hell no. That's the rub. Everyone says "take advantage of the time off! Study for the shelf!" But when your days are severely unstructured, all you (I) end up doing is sleeping more and reading more fiction novels and taking people on crutches out for coffee.

But anyway. Today I had my last day with my "anchor physician," an amazingly smart and personable guy out in York, PA. I gladly drove the 50 minutes both ways to learn from this guy. It's not every day you find someone dedicated to teaching you a thing or two.

Today I saw a young guy who was bitten by a tick. How he knew so is because he'd extracted the tick from his underarm himself with alcohol and tweezers---and he brought it in in a baggie! The thing was still alive---BLOOOO!!! I don't like ticks much. This little guy didn't look too engorged, however, and not like a deer tick nymph either. Though the guy had a small circle around the bite, the fact that the tick was intact means it probably hadn't been sucking on him long (or else he'd have been more buried and his mouthparts probably woulda stayed in the guy's skin). But my Anchorman did drop the tick into a tiny jar of formalin to send to the lab for identification---he and I were kind of sad when he did it. "I hate even killing spiders now" he said, sheepishly. "That could've been your GRANDMOTHER!" I said.

We got along swimmingly, he and I. Sadly, my Anchor time is over.

Although this rotation seems like a bunch of shadowing sometimes, and a bunch of time off, at least I got a few quality experiences. I'm a curriculum rep so I get to formerly complain about this thing and how it robs us of 4 solid weeks in the hospital that would give us a better basis for treating people in the future. Any Hershey medical student reading this, send me your feedback!

And now it's time for more Dyspnea questions! I've studied something today, AND I'm going to study tomorrow...CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?

=D