Circling...

Copperkins is sicky.

Her blood work showed elevated liver function tests. Her abdominal ultrasound and chest x-ray showed liver (and other) badness, as expected.

For now the plan is doggy NAC + metronidazole (she also has diarrhea) + tramadol + food, TLC and waiting for the inevitable. I hope she's not suffering too much :-/

Don't judge me

I felt so resourceful when I came up with the idea of saran wrapping my iPod Touch. I'm too cheap to pay the $5 or whatever for that clear sticker, but I did want some sort of scratch protection cuz I'm pretty rough with my gear. And then I had a eureka moment: cut a rectangle of cling wrap and stick it on to the front of my iPod! Instant protection! At a fraction of the cost! And a practically unlimited supply! Yay!

Then I realized that I always make fun of my mom for saran wrapping the stove controls ("It keeps off the grease!" she'll say)...Which immediately makes me think:
1. Wow, is there anything saran wrap isn't useful for?
2. I'M BECOMING MY MOM
3. At least I'm a generationally appropriate saran wrapper.

Top ten lists

I've been meaning to post this for a while but always got distracted by one thing or another. Top ten lists are sappy-assed staples of graduating people, but I can't resist. Here are the two top ten lists that are probably the most meaningful to me in med school. Maybe I will do one for Durham at a later time (as crazy as it sounds, I heart Durham and North Cackalacky now).

The most mind blowing thing that I learned in med school:
10. You can take 800mg of ibuprofen at a time. That's FOUR pills. AT ONE TIME.
9. PAs can do surgery! I thought they could only do floor/clinic work.
8. It is really weird to pull a uterus and ovaries out of someone's vagina.
7. Plastic surgery is the rotation in which medical students are most often allowed to stitch patients shut.
6. The "hot muscle" on a man is not actually a muscle. It's a ligament!
5. There is a physical exam maneuver where you grab someone's eyeballs with tweezers and forcibly move them around.
4. The Van Nes rotationplasty. Heheheh.
3. When someone receives a donor kidney, it is put in just above their groin.
2. Sepsis does not equal bacteremia. That is, someone can be septic without a blood stream infection!
1. The axes of the vagina and the axis of the cervix are not necessarily in line, or even parallel. When you get to the end of the vagina, the cervix is not always there. Incidentally, it is also really hard to find the urethra in a woman.

This next list will be funny for medical peeps. Non-medical peeps - if you have any of these symptoms YOU MAY HAVE THAT CORRESPONDING DISEASE! Hahaha just kidding. (Seriously, I'm just kidding.)

Diseases I thought I had and presenting symptom:
10. Scabies - recurrent wrist rash
9. Anemia - fatigue
8. Carpal tunnel syndrome - grip weakness, tingling in 1-3rd digits (I think I actually do have this)
7. Deep vein thromboses - calf pain
6. Avascular necrosis of the hip - hip pain
5. Whooping cough - coughing fits x 4 weeks (actually, I really think I had that too)
4. Rib fracture - rib pain during the "whooping cough" episode
3. Diabetes mellitus - thirst
2. Zenker's diverticulum - dysphagia
1. Med student hypochondriasis - being crazy between 2005 and 2009.

Ping

Jeesh, blog is getting dusty. Much bloggable stuff always happens in these transitions, but there's never enough time to blog about it. This one is sadly no different. FL and Belize were fun tho! Orientation tomorrow, and then official start a week from Tuesday. Yeekface.

Checking in

I might have to switch to twitter simply because I don't have the attention span these days to post more than 1 or 2 sentences. Anyways, back in Boston now! (well, Massachusetts anyways).

Feeling sicky

My morning tooth brushing was interrupted by Blackburn's puke prodromes (sounds like someone aggressively plungering a toilet). I immediately ran down the stairs, scooped him up and rushed him outside. We were both covered in toothpaste foam by the time we got out; however, instead of puking, he just stood there and stared at my foamy face. So I let him back in thinking the danger had passed, and he promptly puked all over his bed. That's just spiteful. Perhaps he's getting me back for something earlier this week, but I can't imagine what...

The weekend, part 2

Will's rugby tourney, a.k.a. the 29th Annual MBA Rugby World Championships! Sounds fancy, no? I was actually really impressed. Teams from everywhere were represented - and I mean everywhere: all across the US, Canada, France, England, Ireland. And they all congregated so that they could play rugby...in Durham, NC. The pitches were actually in Danville, VA...which is just a few miles north of where I did my family med rotation. Ah, it brings back memories.

Anyhow, some highlights from the photo reel. This was a FUN event to photograph...and it was a lot easier to get good pictures too. The powwow, though a fun event, was actually difficult (for me) to photograph. If it's possible, I think there was actually too much going on. My pictures ended up looking incredibly chaotic and even garish. I'm not sure how to fix this...even when I opened up the aperture all the way it didn't sufficiently blur out the background. I think it's a composition problem. Perhaps I should do a better job of zooming/cropping/picking the subject? But I digress. Back to rugby:

Sizing up the opposition.


This seems like a fairly bad idea, but these lifts are a regular part of the game.


Will fights off the opposition.


This pyramid looks structurally unsound.


A "ruck"?...


Water break.


...Or maybe this is a ruck?


Tackled!


Pain is temporary...


Glory is forever! Victory for Team Haas!