Quick Update

By Mister Curie


Just a quick update.  I finished 3 weeks of Neurology and took the final exam on Friday.  Monday starts a week of Ophthalmology  and the next week is Orthopedic Surgery.  For  Neurology  I was got the assignment to work at the Children's Hospital. It was great to get some clinical interaction with kids again. There was a nice overlap with genetics and Neurology.  It was also incredibly depressing to see some of the terrible things some children go through.  Neurology is home to some of the most depressing  illnesses imaginable.  It reminded me of  Elder Packer's now famous: "Why  would God do that to anyone?"  I saw kids with genetic diseases that left their nerves undeveloped who will never be able to breath on their own.  I saw other kids who have seizures that have destroyed their brains and they no longer can interact with the world.  I saw others born without most of their brain and some who had strokes that had transformed them from normal kids to vegetables.  I prefer to not believe in  a  God  who controls the minutiae of our lives such that He is responsible for such things happening.  If anything, the  experience was a testimony builder for my atheism.  I'm grateful to no longer have to try and reconcile such atrocities with a loving Heavenly Father.

Compartmentalization

By Mister Curie

My OB/GYN rotation is half over.  I've delivered several babies, learned to do the pelvic exam, diagnosed STDs, counseled on birth control, and been privy to intensely intrusive experiences that patients grant their doctors, particularly in OB/GYN.  The rotation has its ups and downs.  I'm learning a lot and it is exciting how much we are able to do to improve the health of our patients.  On the other hand, there is a certain messiness inherent to OB/GYN work that is just nasty and I don't think I'll be seeking a career in OB/GYN.

Despite ongoing efforts to decompartmentalize my life, this rotation seems to be reinforcing a certain amount of compartmentalization.  I'm out at a rural health center where I stay in the nursing dorms during the week and then come back to the city on the weekends for classroom instruction.  When I am out at the hospital, I have essentially no family responsibilities and its like I'm a single student in undergrad again.  When I come back to the city I try to spend time with the family and I'm so busy with household responsibilities that I hardly have time to study.  It's great to have so much study time out at the hospital so I don't feel too stressed without study time over the weekends, but I have this odd feeling of compartmentalization to my life.  At the hospital I'm granted extremely intrusive access to patients (such as being part of a team of three doctors shoved between the legs of an anesthetized woman performing a vaginal hysterectomy) and then there is this entirely different life at home.  I think easing back into clinics with this away rotation has probably been the best way to get back into my clinical rotations, but there will need to be additional work at reintegrating my life during the next rotations, when I will be at the local hospital and living at home during the rotation.

OB/GYN

My two week refresher course is over and my graded clinical experiences begin tomorrow.   My rotation is out in the middle of nowhere where I will have to stay in the dorms, leaving my wife and son back at home.

My first rotation back is a 6-week OB/GYN rotation, which basically means there are going to be lots of vaginas.

Back in clinics

Having finished up my PhD, I am now back in clinics to learn how to be a doctor. I have been in my refresher course for one week and have one week left to go before actual graded course work begins. The clinic schedule is somewhat different from working in a lab with really early mornings and eighty hour work weeks, not to mention a loss of autonomy and the ability to structure my own day. But I am in a very different place personally than I was last time I was in the clinics and overall I think it is a better place to be. Things are also coming back to me faster than I expected them to. I was working in the lab for a long time.