Day 23: A brief encounter with death

Today's inane images of the day:

I usually despise anything even faintly orange-tinted... but I made an exception for this beauty!

How trippy is this flower?! You should see it in real life -- gorgeous!

Well, I made it safely home last night at around 1:30AM... my flight landed slightly later than scheduled and it took awhile to get from the airport to the parking lot where my car was. Add that to the fact that I live nearly an hour away, and you get a very tired medical student who still had two chapters worth of a medical interview text to read. Somehow, I completed the reading and survived a very full day without a nap or passing out.

Today was our first practice with medical interviewing as well as the first encounter with our cadaver in Anatomy lab.

For the interviewing practice, we actually split up into small groups of 3 and did role playing. I lost in nose goes and was forced to be the "physician" first. One of my TBL group members was my patient... and let me tell you, it was nearly impossible to not let giggles escape. For example, he referred to his son as "brother" and told me that his family only meets for very important occasions such as Abe Lincoln's birthday and flag day. I kid you not.

Although I had fun, I was slightly annoyed that pointers about open ended questions were given after I had strained to maintain a 15 minute interview with a patient who takes great pride in celebrating flag day. Plus, this embarrassing footage was recorded. Yes! I will have to relive it over and over again in the future!

Afterwards, it was my turn to be a patient, and I assure you that I was a fabulous model patient.

From there, we went to our second anatomy lecture [and as always, Dr. Bee was enthusiastic and ready to make us fall in love with the subject]. I remember walking toward the classroom and noting a stranger walking out of the door. Once I was on the other end of the door, it became apparent that I didn't recognize any of the heads that were in the back row. For a split second, I worried that I had walked into the wrong lecture hall, but as I sat down, I remembered that we were taking anatomy alongside Physical Therapy [PT] students.

Each of our anatomy groups has a couple of medical and a couple of PT students. This actually made for an extremely positive dissection experience [at least in our group] because our PT students were much more familiar with structures and names. Not to say that we were unprepared... but really, all of us have been busy cramming in biochemistry and cell biology and immunology and microbiology that anatomy kind of took a backseat. I don't know about my classmates, but I definitely felt unprepared.

I also felt unprepared to face our cadaver for the first time. Since we were the second group in, she had already had her skin and most of the adipose tissue removed. We do not see our cadavers' faces since they are covered until we work in the head region. So imagine how eerie it is to walk into your first anatomy dissection [ever] to find a body [with a covered face] and flaps of skin open to reveal the musculature beneath. She had such human features, yet nothing felt real about her at all.

Although I wasn't emotionally impacted by the situation during the dissection [I think the situation was too surreal to be able to comprehend what was going on], afterwards, it seemed to hit me like a pile of textbooks -- I had my first true encounter with death.

Day 18: Do you have a Beaumont doctor?

Today's inane images of the day:

I just thought it was too funny that my textbooks take up at least 1/3 of the space in my carry on luggage for my trip to L.A. tomorrow. Oh, the life of a medical student!

Have you heard about this beautiful book by Dr. Diokno and Diane Carey? It chronicles the making of our fabulous health system!

OUWB is always full of surprises! We were each given a personalized copy of "Do You Have A Beaumont Doctor?" Could you imagine writing a note in 50 of these books?! 

I now have yet another reason to love OUWB -- we were surprised with a presentation from Dr. Diokno and a gift of the "Do You Have A Beaumont Doctor?" book. We learned a lot about the history of the Beaumont Health System through his presentation and it reminded me of how great of an opportunity I have to be part of the inaugural class! Please do consider purchasing the book, as proceeds benefit the Capstone Project Scholarship Fund.

In preparation for my trip to visit Mike in L.A. tomorrow, I couldn't help but feel butterflies fluttering around in my stomach. I'm definitely not nervous to see him, but it reminds me of the thrill of preparing for a first date with someone you just know will be amazing. I cannot believe that a whole month has passed since I left LAX to start here at OUWB -- the time away from him has been excruciating, but the only thing between me and him right now is a TBL [this time it's graded!] and a plane ride.

I'M SO EXCITED!

Roadtrip update: from Duarte, CA

Today's inane image of the day:

We had a fireplace in our room at the Colony Palms Hotel.

It's sad that I have a fear of fire because just looking at a fireplace really has a calming effect on me. There was this cute little fireplace in our room as well as a cozy sitting area near a fireplace to dry off from the pool -- both of which were really relaxing to sit in front of. Mmm, I'm already missing my resort time!

Currently I'm sitting in Mike's new apartment in Duarte, California [the city is about 15 minutes from Pasadena]. Sadly, this is my last full day here [CA weather has not disappointed and neither has spending endless hours with Mike] so we've planned an adventure out to see the blocky Hollywood letters [I'm a tourist... what can I say?!] then to relax and walk around in Beverly Hills. I'll be back to visit Mike during the Labor Day weekend, so hopefully I'll get to slowly chip away at seeing various sites in L.A. during my future visits [and maybe even spotting my favorite reality TV star, Lauren Conrad].

In the meantime, I feel like there's a huge dark cloud of tasks that I need to complete before starting orientation on Monday [I seriously cannot believe that I'm only 5 days away from being a real medical student!]. Unfortunately, my vaccination forms are taking longer than they should to complete and I've been neglecting the various tasks that I had planned to do during trip downtime [finishing my lab data analysis, making a lab presentation, looking into the Anatomy primer, doing the online orientation, filling out various other forms... the list goes on!]. Hopefully when I return tomorrow, I'll be ridiculously efficient with my time and get a ton of things done.

Anyway, time to get moving -- Mike's making us a tasty breakfast of french toast and eggs... mmm I'm excited.