What I Really Learned in Med School

An Honest Narration of My Surgery Rotation   Dressed head to toe in sterile protective equipment, surrounded by blue drapes and beeping machines, I watch a surgical resident cut into bare flesh with a scalpel. It feels counter intuitive. The patient must be harmed in order to be healed. I wish I could take a picture of what I see now every day. I guess Google images will have to do. My life feels like an episode of greys anatomy (Season 1) without all the sex and drama in the stairwells. I am running after my residents like a little duckling and getting chastised for either taking too long to interview a patient or not gathering enough of the history (depending on who I am with that day). I am a minion. Two weeks of gyn surgery. I did endometrial biopsies and sutured skin incisions closed and even did a little work with the tools during a laparoscopic hysterectomy. I watched a uterus filled with cancerous tissue get removed from a woman's body. I assisted o

New Orleans (aka The Big Easy) has officially won me over. I recommend that everyone who gets half a chance to visit this city to do it. All our visitors have made comments like "This is nothing like real life" and "I have never been anywhere like this." Some pictures from Dad's trip to NOLA - So great to have him here! We drove through the areas that were hit the worst by Katrina Still deserted houses with the hurricane markings The Rebuild by the Make It Right Foundation founded by Brad Pitt Other celebrities involved include Angelina Jolie, Oprah, and Ellen DeGeneres The project's intentions were to build environmentally friendly homes but unfortunately the "green" products have been unable to withstand the humid conditions of New Orleans and are now rotting The whole story is very interesting - you can read more about the project at http://makeitright.org Sign showing where we were standing All you can see of the su

LSU Tigers vs Florida Gators Most fun I have had in a while! Cheered and danced with the 102,000 person crowd in Death Valley My first experience tailgating involved parades and beers and wild animals We met up with our friends from the hospital at an off campus bar afterwards My mind has been blown and my expectations for sporting events has been raised so high ~300 person marching band LSU's mascot is an actual tiger...

Internal Medicine has been filled with interesting patients and diverse pathology. It has been our longest rotation yet - 12 weeks instead of 6. I've definitely enjoyed it, but we weren't given as much independence as I've had in other rotations. Many people (including me, like 3 months ago) don't know much about what Internal Medicine is, so I will preface this post with that. Basically, the Internist and his/her team are the physicians (and students) that takes care of you when you get admitted to the hospital. That is, if you are an adult and you are there for a reason besides surgery or psychiatric care. Our patients are the people who come into the ER or to clinic who are sick enough to need to stay in the hospital overnight or longer. The admissions can include heart attacks, heart failure, strokes, pneumonia, cirrhosis, pancreatitis, kidney failure, and serious infections of the skin or heart or brain. Sometimes we work in partnership with the surgery team if, f