I havent blogged in a few weeks because of my crazy crazy exam schedule. I knew this semester had a lot more exams than last, but its kind of amazing how much material we have already learned and been tested on this far. In fact, I have my first final of the semester, in immunology, this Friday!
Like I mentioned in Fall v. Spring, one of the neat things about the Spring semester is that we get way more clinical experiences. One of these required clinical experiences is shadowing our faculty mentors in either their clinic or in a hospital. My faculty mentor, an endocrinologist, is actually gone for a few months to do research in Florida, so I shadowed one of this partners in his endocrinology clinic. Although I shadowed physicians as an undergrad (as everyone hoping to enter medical school does), I was nervous to see if the expectations and experience would be different now that I'm no longer "pre"-med, but instead a real med student. Well, I definitely was right to fear there would be different expectations....
After first meeting my physician that I was shadowing, I was immediately handed a CBC. Although we "practiced" reading CBCs in biochemistry, when you are handed your first one and asked "whats wrong with this patient", it is much much different. Luckily, my normal guess of "anemia" proved to be correct (point 1 for Kailyne)! After talking about our first patient, we went in the room to see our first patient. After talking with her and examining her, the physician told me to listen to her heart and lung sounds and to tell him 2 things that I find that are abnormal. Well, considering the fact that I am just now learning heart and lung sounds (2 weeks after I shadowed), I had no clue of what to do. My patient was very nice and told me that I should be looking for a murmur, but of course, I still don't really know what that sounds like (negative one point for Kailyne). After this, the next four hours seemed to go up and down like this. I would correctly guess that a patients medicine was causing hyperprolectemia, and then fail at describing Graves Disease (something else I learned just 2 days after this shadowing experience). So, I know that I am not expected to know everything, but every time I would get excited that I knew something, seconds later I would be reminded that I really don't know much...Oh well, I guess I am going to have to get used to it because of the nature of my future career!
In the end, I am really happy that I got this shadowing experience to begin to prepare myself for what I will expect in 3rd year rotations. I realize I will no longer be able to hide in a classroom answering multiple choice questions when I am one-on-one with a physician/resident and in patient rooms. I know I still have more than a year before I will have to face this reality, but I definetely want to get more shadowing experiences under my belt before I have to go in as as a third year, who is really supposed to know what the heck they are doing! *Gulp*
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