Missionary Orthopod in the Making

So as you know I am done with my 6 weeks of general surgery and now I am on my 6 weeks of surgical subspecialties. I spent the first 2 weeks of my surgical subspecialties on neurosurgery and the coolness of seeing the brain definitely wore off after the first week. But this past week […]

So yeah, I kinda dropped the ball on blogging about the end of my general surgery service, but to sum it all up, I am glad it is over, and I hope to never have to do it again. It wasn’t the hours or the people, I just truly did not enjoy what they operated […]

So its currently like 5:30 in the morning and I’m up on call, didn’t go to sleep. Its been a crazy time with plenty of trauma. This dude who was hyped up on meth put his hand through a glass window  completely transecting his radial artery and many of his flexor muscles. If it was […]

So if you had asked me last year how much I would be blogging during my 3rd year surgery rotation I would have told you, “About every 10 minutes, because its going to be so bloody awesome”. Now that I have finished week 5 of my 6 weeks of general surgery I realize how different […]

The Lord is truly too good to me. When I was interested in General Surgery or Urology I had started a research project on pediatric kidney transplants so that I could hopefully get a research publication out of it. The attending that I hooked up with was super nice and basically let me run full […]

So I’ve been practicing some one handed suture ties on a very willing can of sierra mist and its going pretty well. I hope that the next time I am asked to suture in the OR that I can break out the one handed tie with confidence.

Sometimes the amount of suffering the a people can go through, while we sit here in America complaining about dropped calls on our iPhones is overwhelming. Seeing the pictures and hearing the reports makes me wish that I finished my training 7 years ago. I heard on NPR last week that they desperately need doctors […]

So I think that somehow God heard that I didn’t feel that I was getting my full, hard, general surgery experience because last night on call I got 1 hour of sleep due to the insane amount of traumas that just kept pouring in. We had like 5 stabbings, a head on collision that brought […]

So I had my first week of my surgery rotation and I am completely exhausted. My day starts at 4am and I am home by 7 p.m. usually. And then it starts all over again. My wife has it worse too; usually I wake up at 4 am, but she is usually gone by 4am […]

So yesterday I got to the hospital at 5 am and saw my patients. I then went to the OR at 7:45am and didn’t finish until. 7 pm. I drove home, studied for a bit on today’s cases and then fell asleep. I woke up again this morning at 4 am and got to the […]

So on Thursday night the deans of my medical school sat all the Junior down to talk about our Senior schedules. From all that they said, truly my 4th year of medical school will be the most flexible year yet and probably the most fun. I will kind of break it down for those who […]

So here at LLU every Tuesday the orthopedics dept. has a basic science meeting where they go over different topics. Tonight they went over spine surgery and the different procedures you can do to correct kyphosis (think humpback of Notre Dame) and lordosis. The procedure entailed cutting wedges out of the spine and putting screws […]

So I have been on my psych rotation for about 3 weeks now and I must say that it is quite a different experience. The first two weeks I was on the general psych ward at the VA hospital and I overall hated it. The majority of the patients there knew the system and basically […]

So on Wednesday I took my oral exams and my OSCE for OBGYN and on Friday I took the national shelf exam for OBGYN. The orals and OSCE that took place on Friday went relatively well. They gave us a list of 35 cases that we could be tested over for our oral exams and […]

It is truly amazing how patients can be such liars. I had a patient who we had operated on for one of her gynecologic cancers. She was recovering well and at least in our view she was ready to go home. When I went to pre-round on her though she asked if she could be […]

So today is the Sabbath and I am on call on L&D. In fact this is the last possible call that students on my current rotation can take and somehow I am the only student here. Our school has said that we have the right to go to church as medical students and that our […]

So every Tuesday the orthopedics residents and attendings meet for their basic science conference where they go over new journal articles or practice drilling into composite bone or other cool stuff. Normally when I go to these meetings its usually the same 3rd /4th year med students that I see, but this past Tuesday I […]

So I went on call with a Urology resident last night although it was a tad bit different because urology residents take home call. So the resident texted e and told me that she of course is on home call and she will text me if she actually has to go in. At about 11 […]

So yesterday my dad had a partial knee replacement. Its so wierd when one of your own family members needs medical care and you are forced to trust another doctor. After the ortho doc came in and talked with my dad my mom called me and told me that the doctor reminded her of me […]

I think I know why now I can’t go into OBGYN. I don’t want to be in a field where a nice subset of my patients don’t want me to treat them. Today a patient wanted me to step out of the room during her gyn exam. I mean do they really think that I […]

Well I’ve been pretty terrible at posting lately but what can you say, that is life. For about 3 weeks I have been on my OB-GYN rotation. The way it works here is that you rotate through all the different sections of OBGYN (high risk, low risk, benign gyn, gyn-onc) during the course. I started […]

I am in every way exhaused. Today is my birthday and I was at the VA hospital for 80% of the day. I like the experience I have had overall on my medicine rotation so far, but I am really ready for this stupid thing to be over now. Happy birthday to me……

So I went into the hospital yesterday with my white coat, dress pants, and bowtie, to pre-round on my patients. As I walk into the main unit past the nurses desk, one of the nurses calls out to me and says, “Good morning, Dr Chocolate.” Lol, I almost drop everything I was holding in my […]

So this upcoming Sunday will make the end of my first inpatient experience as a 3rd year medical student. I would say that the first battle that I have had internally this month has nothing to do with my rotation…the battle has been with which specialty I should pursue, Orthopedics or General Surgery. I’ve talked […]

So it is 5:40am and I am almost done with my 32 hour shift of being on call. To be honest I know that I have it easier than the 3rd years did last year because I actually got 5 hours of sleep last night. Last year the 3rd years got 0-2 hrs of sleep […]

So today I decided to be a little spontaneous and wear a bowtie with my dress up clothes to the hospital today. I got way more attention that I hoped to get; so much so that once we finished rounds the attending spent the last 15 min. talking to the whole group about how he […]

So if you live in southern California you would have heard about the massive prison riot today that occured in many of the jails. Almost 1200 people were involved and it mainly consisted of the Mexicans jumping the Blacks. Of course the Mexicans outnumber the blacks in this area so many of the patients that […]

So this past Friday marked my last day on the first of three sections in my Internal Medicine rotation. I really am glad that I started off the way I did because I basically didn’t have to interact with residents; it was just me and the attending. This really allowed the attending to teach me […]

I tell you something is really wrong with me. When I was at the NMA conference is saw that most of the doctors and especially most of the general surgeons had blackberries. That fact combined with my fickle cellphone nature led me to get a blackberry bold. Lol I know that I have a cell […]