Cake Pop Fail

Tomorrow is the end of my 3rd week on Internal Medicine! I have spent these last three weeks with the same group of 3 residents. Sadly, tomorrow all of the residents are done with their first block of of the year and will be moving on to new services. So, to show my appreciation, I thought I would make some cupcakes. THEN, I got a brilliant idea. Whats better than cupcakes? CAKE POPS! Of course, I have never made cake pops...but how hard could they be?

Here is my journey towards making the most perfect cake pops.


Step 1: Get all of your supplies ready!

Step 2: Bake the perfect cake.

Step 3: Crumble up the perfect cake and mix with frosting. Put them in a circular dish so that they form cake-ball structures. 

Step 4: Decorate by putting a which chocolate coat around the cake pop and decorate with colored frosting.

....
....
....
....
....
....
....
....

The result of all of this hard work (3 hours worth of baking):

Tada!!

....Cake pop fail. 

First Few Days of Internal Medicine

3 days down, hundreds of day to go left of third year!

It has been quite the crazy last few days. From having my first clerkship orientation, to learning everything I would ever want to know in a 2-day 8 hour ECG work-shop, to having my first patients, to learning to navigate the EMR, and to finding out my score of just a little thing called Step 1 (but I'll get to that later).

Day 1: Monday morning, I went to Sparrow Hospital at 8 AM (which seems so late in the day now). We met with our incredibly nice clerkship coordinators in the morning to go over 1) the clerkship calendar, 2) all of the requirements, 3) how to honor, and many more important topics. It was amazingly informative. After the orientation, our little group of 5 students on the Medicine clerkship had 5:2 attention during a 5-hour ECG workshop (part 1) with two amazing Internal Medicine docs. They used the socratic method and basically put up and ECG, called us up to the overhead and made us interpret them even though we had absolutely no idea what was going on. Eventually, however, ECGs became (dare I say it) fairly easy to read and I know feel (somewhat) confident in how to interpret them! Who would have guessed? After the ECG workshop, we got a quick introduction to all of the different cases and logs we would have to complete on various websites and then got to have the rest of the afternoon to start reading and register for all of the millions of websites and research tools we needed to register for.

Day 2: Our first day with patients!!!! Gahh...I was so nervous. I went up to the 8th floor of Sparrow Hospital at about 7:10 AM. We were supposed to be there by 7:15 for morning report (where the night shift docs hand off the patients in a very systematic way to the daytime docs). I didn't really know what was going on for the first hand-off, but I think I did a good job pretending by jotting down notes in the margins of our patient list. After hand-off, the resident looked at me and told me to "go see the patient in room ***." And that was it...no shadowing, no introductory patient... I was just told to go see the patient and report back when it was time to round with the attending. I spent 1.5 hours with my first patient. I know, I know this sounds like an ABSURDLY long time to spend with one patient...but I am not efficient yet and I don't know whats important, so I pretty much got this guy's life story, which was quite fascinating. After doing a history and physical exam on my patient, I headed back to the resident room, checked some of his info on the EMR, went to meet with the attending, and gave my first real oral presentation (talk about nervous!!!). Much to my surprise, the oral presentation went really well! After all of the patients had been discussed and we had come up with plans for each of the patients, we rounded as a team to each of the patients' rooms with the attending physician to further speak with the patients. It was a really amazing first day of rounding and I learned a TON. I thought I was going to absolutely hate internal medicine, but I've loved it so far! After rounding, we headed back to a lecture room and finished our last few hours of ECG work-shop (part 2).

Day 3: Today was crazy fast-paced. I got in a little earlier (6:55ish) to look up my patients, but quickly ran out of time. By the time morning report and a quick resident-given lecture about acute COPD exacerbation was complete, it was 9 AM and I had only 30 minutes to round on 3 patients! 3! This time yesterday, I spent 1.5 hours on 1 patient! So, obviously I freaked out and didn't do well, but hey I guess its my second day and its not that big of a deal. I have learned my lesson and will show up earlier tomorrow! After a morning of rounding, we headed again to a lecture; this time it was split into a Q&A session (basically answering board-type questions in my little group of 5) and 30 min mini-lecture on anemias. Overall, it was a pretty good day, but I know that I need to get my s*#& together when it comes to rounding on my patients earlier/quicker/more efficiently, but I think that will come with time.

Oh...and something else that happened today...................I FINALLY got my Step 1 score. You know, Step 1..The exam that I spent a month intensively studying for. The exam that determines where/when I can do residency. Yeah, that exam thats kind of a big deal. We were told that the exam scores would be released to MSU early this morning. If we had failed, the school was going to page us to come in and talk about when we could retake the exam/whether or not we had to stop the current clerkship we were on. If we didn't receive a call, our exam scores would be released via email by 11 AM. So, I had to use all of my self control not to frantically check my email/text messaging every 6 seconds. Thank goodness that I had a busy morning, otherwise I think I would have gone crazy. Well, all morning I waited and waited...convinced that I would get a page. Finally, a little after 11 AM I got a text from a friend to tell me scores were up. I took that as I sign that I had passed and let out a HUGGGEEE sigh of relief. I decided a while ago that I didn't want to check my score for a while, but with EVERYONE around me telling me to check it, I finally gave in at around 4 PM. I made my friend Michelle stand with me while I opened it, because I was so terrified that I would burst into tears. So, after a few seconds of calming myself down, I pushed "view results" and closed my eyes. When I finally mustered up enough courage, I opened my eyes and *sigh* I could finally breathe! I was so so happy with my score. It wasn't the highest score I had gotten on a practice test, but it was close. Its a score that puts me significantly above average for most medical specialties, especially those that I am actually interested in. Its a score that puts me in a position that (according to the latest residency charting outcomes) "almost always grants an interview" at the majority of residency programs. So, yes. I did it! Such a relief. Good riddens, Step 1! I'm so glad that is officially over with!

Third Year Orientation

Last week, I spent my first of many long days to come at Sparrow Hospital getting oriented to what my 3rd year would be like. To be honest, about 50% of it was common sense or things we have already learned (ex: dress code, professionalism, how to give an oral presentation), but the other 50% was pretty useful information. Most important of this information was getting trained on two different EMR systems, which are ridiculously confusing. Hopefully it doesn't take me too long to really understand the EMR during clerkships.

In addition to lots of talks about what to expect during third year, we finally got our finalized schedules. We had a one-on-one meeting with our clinical coordinator months ago, so we kind of knew what our schedules would look like, but only our first rotation was guaranteed. Overall, I got almost exactly what I wanted...so I'm happy. My schedule is as follows:

1) Internal Medicine (2 months)
2) Surgery (2 months)
3) Ob/Gyn (2 months)
*Winter Break*
4) Family Medicine (2 months)
5) Pediatrics (2 months)
6) Elective (1 month) [Not entirely sure what I'm going to do...maybe a research month? maybe anesthesia?]
7) Psych (1 month)

We were also given our swipey badges to have access to all over the hospital and to get out of the parking lot for free (woo!)... AND we were given our pagers! All of us immediately whipped out our iPhones to take pictures of our new pagers, 'cuz thats pretty cool. At least, it seemed cool until our Clinical Coordinator stated that "we must have these pagers on us 24/7 from now until you graduate." Then, my whole class collectively realized that maybe we shouldn't be as excited for something that we will surely get sick of very quickly!

Now that I'm done with orientation, I have realized that this is it. Tomorrow morning, I will be marching into Sparrow Hospital to start my very first day of third year with real doctors, real residents, and (most importantly) real patients. I am so nervous, so terrified, so excited, so eager...but I feel like this is normal for an incoming M3 that has absolutely no idea what to expect for the next 12 months. Wish me luck for my first day!

Wine Tasting [Photo Blog]

A Week at Home

I'm officially back in Michigan and ready for 3rd year. I actually had my first day of orientation today (which I'll talk about later), but before I get to that...I need to blog about my fabulous week of "Summer Break"at home.

Since I took my boards after only 4.5 weeks, I was lucky to have 2 weeks of summer break. I know, I know - it sounds like nothing, but some of my classmates took boards a few days ago and only had 1 weekend of summer break. I would have gone crazy. The first week of my fabulous vacation I spent in Hawaii and Southern California, but the last week I headed up to NorCal to hang out with my friends and family in good ol' Elk Grove.

I got into the Sacramento airport late on Sunday night, but went straight to bed. It had been quite a long time since I have been home, so it felt great to sleep in my gigantic comfy bed.

The next day, my mom and I went to the SPCA. Both of my parents have been volunteering there for the last few months, so my mom wanted me to see where she was working. Well, I went... and I fell in love, with my new friend Carlos the guinea pig. He was just so sweet. After a few minutes, I knew that I wanted to adopt him. Sadly, my mom became my voice of reason and told me I needed to check 1) if I can take Carlos on the plane with me, and 2) if I can have guinea pigs in my new apartment. Unfortunately, Delta airlines have a strict policy and only allows you to "ship" a guinea pig. Clearly I was not going to ship a live creature, so I had to let Carlos go back into his cage at the SPCA :(

After leaving the SPCA, I got my hair done:

...and ate dinner at the most delicious restaurant in all of Elk Grove, Wasabi. It's a delicious Japanese steak house where they cook all the food right in front of you. Yum.

The next day, I went out to lunch with some of my very best friends. We went to this delicious Italian restaurant right next to Katie's workplace. After lunch, we decided to create our own "Take your friends to work day" and crash her day of work. This was the result:

The next day, my parents and I went out to the Sacramento/American Rivers to go boating for the day. Normally, Sam is the driver, while my mom and I sunbathe...but today, I got to drive the boat for the majority of the day! The boat maxes out at about 35-40 mph and I got it up to just about that high. I also did some donuts in the water to learn how to turn into waves. It was so fun. I am for sure getting a boat once I actually make a salary.

That night, the fam and I went to a Seafood buffet. We had to wait 1.5 hours, but it was so worth it. Crab legs, sushi, and many different types of shrimp. Delicious.

That weekend, S was able to rearrange his work schedule to get the whole weekend off! [Unfortunately, now he has to work for 14 days straight.] Since he was able to come up to Sacramento, we spent Saturday wine tasting with some of my very best friends. I had never been wine tasting, but it was something I have always wanted to do. I had such a great afternoon!

After we got done with wine tasting, Morgan and I had a double date with S and her boyfriend Nick at Chevys mexican restaurant! 

The waiter told us he took a "really good picture"
...this was it. Seriously? 

Sadly, my fabulous week at home eventually came to an end and I headed back to school. Thank goodness I have a whole week of orientation, because my brain is still on vacation.