A Day

So, some have asked, "How was your day?"

My typical day in med school starts around 7 am after about an hour of fighting with my alarm clock. I roll into the bathtub for a few more minutes of sleep, eat breakfast (aren't you proud of me mom?!), pack my lunch, and pedal off to school for my 8am class. Today, that was Doctoring - Small Groups. For two hours, I and five other people on my team (who will remain on my team at least for this year and maybe for the next three years), perform mock interviews with an actor who has been hired by the school to play a patient.

Today was our first interview, so it was a little rough, since this is a "problem-based learning" course, and we don't get any instructions. I think we did pretty well though, given the circumstances. "Good morning Ms. Grant, my name is A____ and I'm a medical student at UC Davis. Do you mind if I ask you some questions about your medical history? Great. So what brings you here today?" And then we're off. A one-hour interview, where each of us has ten mintues to ask questions and then the next person goes and picks up from where the previous person left off. In between, we evaluate what we heard from the patient, make hypotheses about her health/concerns/state of mind and consider the next direction that the interview will take. With six people, with six very different personalities, it can be quite disjointing, but I think we were all pretty impressed with each other.

OK. That makes it 10am. I grab hot water in my huge Seattle mug and make myself some tea.

10-11 am Biochem lecture. Today's topic was biological membranes, membrane proteins, receptors and signaling pathways. I know I learned it all before, but I'm definitely going to have to review (_a lot_).

11am-noon. Embryology: Development of the Gut. As exciting as it sounds. Had that already once as well, but one would never guess.

noon-1pm Optional elective I'm taking: Intro to Internal Medicine. Free pizza lunch. Today a jaded doc talked about his experiences working in Pulmonary/Critical Care.

1pm-3pm Anatomy lab. For the first time, I got some solo dissection time, which was pretty nice. Dissected out the major vessels of the abdomen, cleaned up the kidneys and their renal vessels, and began exploring the vessels and nerves of the inferior posterior abdominal all. Really like it when the dissection of one area is almost done and things start to make sense (the main ten arteries can be traced back to the aorta and identified, the autonomic and somatic nerves can be differentiated, the crazy intestine doesn't look so intimidating anymore (a pile of knotted noodles you have to identify by name).

3pm-4:30 Surface Anatomy. "Here are your water soluble markers. Rip off your shirts boys and girls and start drawing all your partner's main abdominal organs on her chest. Let's start with the diaphragm. The right dome is 1-2 inches higher than the left and begins in the fourth intercostal space in the midclavicular line. The diaphragm than dips at the xiphosternal junction before coming back up to the third lobe. The lateral border of the diaphragm decends at the 10th rib in the midaxillary line. Now on to the liver..."

5pm-6pm Optional Phleobotomy clinic run by one of the student interest groups. I was lucky to have an athletic partner who had wonderful veins that almost looked like cables on the Golden Gate Bridge. My partner was lucky that I still have some of my climbing veins left. Things were going very smoothly (insert needle, attach tube, collect blood, remove tourniquet, remove tube, remove needle, compress and band-aid) until I tried to take blood from a friend who had normal veins.

6:30-7 Sit with friends on the steps of Tupper Hall, mustering the motivation to stay on campus and do research for our clinical case presentations. (2 month old with symptoms of an incarcerated indirect inguinal hernia)

7-8pm Attempt to access online medical sites to do said research. Fight with access privilage problems. Realize that even though I'm paying a lot of tuition to a medical school and I may never get around to actually learning medicine, I'm definitely going to leave this particular institution with a solid IT background. Did I mention that we have 4+ logins and 4+ passwords and they have the potential to all mix (16 variable combinations!) when we're trying to access something on campus?

8-11pm: Ride home (love my bike!), fix dinner (mix four cans of peas, corn, beans, tuna, add seasoned rice vinegar, a bit of mayo and mustard, a bit of relish, a bit of chili pepper, a chopped glove of garlic. it's not julia child's recipe but it comes out to $2 for three meals). Try to find out where I could research all the possible explanations for vomiting and abdominal distension in a 2 month old. Give up and go grocery shopping for water. Write blog. Realize that it made no sense for me to stay up until 3 am last night if it just means I'm completely ineffective the next day. Go to bed.