Things are quite good here. Very very busy. Here's some stuff I've been up to:

1. Hospice volunteering. I am a hospice volunteer, which means I visit once a week with a client who is terminally ill. My client is very close to death right now and it has left me feeling very strange. It is so hard to come up with things to say when someone might be in their last hours of life.

2. Every year each med school class comes up with a musical skit for a play called Tachycardia. I'm just a background dancer/singer but we've been pretty busy with rehearsals for that.

3. Tonight we're having a shakespeare reading of Macbeth. Going to be fun!

This was the first week of our cardiology block. I mostly familiar with this stuff from my undergrad in life sciences. We're learning how to read EKGs (Electrocardiograms) which I'm finding pretty interesting. In our anatomy lab we dissected a heart this week.

Yesterday I went to visit my hospice client. I am part of a research project that trains medical students to be hospice volunteers. They are trying to see if having exposure to hospice and palliative care makes physicians more comfortable with death and dying.

On Tuesday night I had trivia. My team's name is Figrin Dan and the Modal Nodes (which is the band that plays in Star Wars... super nerdy). We play every Tuesday at the grad club. This week we came in third place over all, which is pretty good!

Today in class we are reviewing what we've learned in the last 2 weeks about ENT (Ears, nose, and throat, or what some call "Ears, nose, and wallet"). We had a doctor come and talk about common ENT issues in family medicine. Next is a small group on ENT and then another group discussion on cleft lip and pallet.

This afternoon I need to catch up on the lectures I've missed this week. The lectures are now online so it is very tempting for me to miss class! I have a group assignment on epidemiology due on Monday that I need to work on before we meet tomorrow. We are analyzing a paper about doctors accidently leaving equipment inside patients during surgery.

Feb 3, 2010

I've created this blog to record my experiences as a medical student. I'm a first year student in Ontario, Canada. All names of patients, doctors, or other students will be changed in this blog so I don't run into any confidentiality issues.

Today I did an observership in Family medicine. An observership is when you follow a doctor around in your first or second year of medical school. The doctors are usually really nice and they don't really expect you to know anything, it just gives you a feel of how medicine actually works in a community. I ended up loving family medicine much more than I expected. I loved the diversity of patients and the fact that the doctor knew the patients well.

Tonight I'm going to see a play with some of my med school friends. I'm a pretty big fan of musical theatre so I'm very excited!