Back to Work

As most of the people who read this blog know, Lisa and I were back in Michigan for almost all of the month of July. We spent half the time with Lisa's family, including a week at a cottage in Holland on Lake MI. The other half of the time we spent with my family, including a week in Disney World. Lisa and I had tons of fun back home and were happy to get out of the Houston heat for a while. The best part of the trip was getting to see family and friends, since we haven't had many chances to get back to Michigan since we moved down a year ago.

Unfortunately, my break came to a quick end. The Monday after we got back I started Block 7, which for right now involves Cardiology and Hematology/Oncology. One good thing about school this fall is that they have changed our test schedule in a way that I think will be less stressful. Baylor classes in previous years have had 10 weeks of classes in block 7; the first four weeks were dedicated to cardio and heme/onc as I have right now, with the remaining time mostly devoted to respiratory and renal. Then they would have a big week of exams over all of the subjects after the 10 weeks. This was hard because you finished taking cardio and heme/onc classes a full 6 weeks before the tests, and then you had to dig that information back up and get ready for a test in a very short period of time. The same thing would happen again in block 8, except it was even worse because the block ended with 10 exams over the course of 3 weeks, including the big end of basic sciences exam which you had to pass to move on to clinics (and several people did fail every year).

So, because of the wonderful complaining of the students above us, they changed it so that we have a test after each individual class, instead of just at the end of each block. So my cardio and heme/onc exams will be at the end of August, instead of mid October. I think this will encourage us to work at a more consistent pace and relieve stress during exam periods, even if there will be many more of them.

My new preceptorship for this fall is actually in the hospitals instead of at the Baylor clinic. While the cystic fibrosis patients I saw last year were very interesting, being in the inpatient setting is a good change. In the first week I saw a patient with diffuse/systemic scleroderma, and a very sick patient with newly diagnosed HIV/AIDS. The emphasis for this fall is to make sure we are comfortable enough with the physical exam to be somewhat useful on rotations and learn more of the abnormal findings that we should be looking for.

I think that this semester will be challenging but fun, and with only about four months to go before rotations, the light is visible at the end of the tunnel.

Lisa has one more week of break before going back, and I think she is excited for this coming year. Her program has been completely restructured, so instead of having a big group all at once for several hours a day, she will be pulling kids out one at a time or even going into the gen ed class rooms to work one on one.

Sorry for the long post!