Of Pretense and Persuasions

Saturday, March 31, 2007

Oh, God. Neurosurgery is not for me. I thought I would find it cool, and it is, but honestly, after I've seen one craniotomy, I feel like I've seen them all. Is it really necessary to spend 7 years learning how to bang holes in people heads? Perhaps it is. I, for one, am not going to stick around to find out.

I met Ben Carson, yesterday. The dude is so cool. So chillax. At baseline, he's asleep. He's so calm and so chill; nothing, not even a disasterious intra-op hemorrhage could phase him. And he's so nice, smart, and logical. It was very inspiring to meet such a class act; not that my residents themselves are not nice, but, well, they're all tired and sleep-deprived human beings. So they act weird on occassion and leave you wondering about their state of humanity.

Saturday, March 10, 2007

Hee heee. I rocked Surgery. Honors, dude, honors. Here, at Yale, they tell you that we don't have grades. But we do. And, hee hee, I rocked surgery. So that makes me happy. Its been an absolutely exhausting year so far and I've been working my freakin' a$$ off, but, hey, I guess its paying off.

But there are miles to go ... still have to finish 2 more weeks of ambulatory, then do the Neuro/Neurosurg clerkship [hmm, do I want to do Neurosurg? hmm, do I absolutely not want to have a life, a family, or children who can recognize me?], and Pediatrics.

I'm working on the plan for next year:
  • Need to do my thesis research --> probably in gene therapy, although bioengineering might also be a good call. I gotta get my act together and find a mentor, like, stat.
  • Write
  • Workout
    • want to be a yoga master
    • probably should brush up on my tae kwon do skills
    • run!
  • Pick up skills
    • want to learn video editing / how to make film
  • Languages
    • brush up on medical russian
    • learn medical chinese
  • Rock Step 2 - 'nuff said
  • Crunchy Medicine
    • Thinking about doing Andrew Weil's Integrative Medicine course out in Arizona
  • Extra Electives
    • Derm, baby, derm. I had no idea how much I would like figuring out rashes.
    • ID elective at UCSF
    • Radiology - chest x-ray what? I can barely how plain films are oriented. Dude, gotta learn.
    • Cardiology
  • Travel
    • Uganda
    • India

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

gaaa. I'm going crazy. I'm meditating seriously, and running 5-6 miles a day so you would think that I'd be super cool and super elevated. Nope. I'm PMSing my brains out. I'm stressing out over the silliest things ... like how I mistook a sprained ankle for left ventricular heart failure today. OMG. I felt SO stupid. And then I rationalized that, in the end, I realized my mistake, that I fixed my patient, and my patient went home thinking the world of me. Only I felt stupid, and bad, and inadequate ... but alas, alack. That is the life of a med student. I fail, I learn, I get better.

So stressful. I never thought this whole family practice rotation would be stressfull but it is. Or maybe its just me PMSing again.

I have to do a student-faculty round presentation on Thursday and I'm perseverating over my topic endlessly. I mean, I wish I could just sit tight and bust it out. But nope. I stress, I google, I waste time, I blog, and then I do my presentation.

Eeep eeep eeep. I want a break. I want to run away. I want to go to Uganda. Yup. I turned in an application to go to Uganda. I don't even know where Uganda is. All I know is that its not New Haven. So I think thats where I might be headed.

Anywayz, so... there's this rumor going around that I want to be a plastic surgeon. And when I heard it, I was like, "Uh, I do? That be the first I's ever heard of it." Plastic Surg is cool and everything but, dude, like, I don't dig the whole superficial thing. I mean, the little cleft-palate kid or the kid who will grow up to be retarded if he doesn't get his cranioplasty is cool ... but those operations ain't gonna pay the bills.... its the mammoplastys, the blephoroplastys, the face lifts that do. And if I had to do those ad nauseum ... dude, show me the door.