Thanksgiving with My Mama!

For the last 3 years, I have had the Thanksgiving tradition of being with S, making us a fabulously extravagant dinner, him doing the dishes, and us calling it a night. Its nothing big, but it became a tradition that I think we both enjoyed. So, this year..when we realized that S would not get any time off for Thanksgiving now that he is a real doctor and I wouldn't have enough time off to go to California, we realized our Thanksgiving tradition had come to an end. I was upset for a while, especially since this was usually a time that we could break our long distance and be together for a while, but I accepted it and moved on to come up with new plans.

My mom suggested that she could come up for Thanksgiving. Since I ALSO hadn't seen my mom since June and even that was only for a few days, I loved the idea. What was even better was that my retired mom is a HUGE planner..so she quickly scheduled us a huge fun packed weekend.

My mom arrived on Tuesday. Unfortunately, the week before Thanksgiving, I was on nights. So, she arrived to my apartment at 4:15 PM and I had to be out of my apartment by 4:30 PM. While it was great that my night shift meant she could sleep in my bed during the night and then, when I came home, I would sleep in my bed during the day...this did mean I really didn't see her or speak to her at all until my night shifts were up on Thursday/Thanksgiving morning. Luckily, since I had nights that week, my clerkship directors gave me the whole weekend off. So, we thanksfully had a lot of time to hang out and explore all of the things she had planned.

THURSDAY: On Thanksgiving, my mom and I had the most awesome day! One of the things on both of our bucket lists was to go to a GB Packers game. If you know anything about my mom and I, its probably that we are big Packers fans. She has loved GB for years and I grew up in that environment so I was raised to love them, but neither of us had ever been to Wisconsin and had never been to a GB game. So, it couldn't be more perfect that GB Packers were playing the Lions in Detroit on Thanksgiving Day! ...Well, it could have been more perfect, because Aaron Rodgers was injured, out of the game, and we lost 40-10 ...BUT, it was amazing and a dream come true, none the less.

Our ridiculously close seats!!! 

Fellow Cheeseheads! 

FRIDAY: We decided to venture off to Canada...which is a whole 5 miles outside of Detroit. We decided to go to a casino in Winsor. We ate at the nicest buffet in the world...they had every cuisine you could think of and everything was made to order (like omelet bars at breakfast buffets) and over 100 different types of desserts! It.Was.Amazing!!! After recovering from food coma, we went and played craps for a few hours. We did decently well....my mom had one streak where she rolled probably 15 times and won us LOTS OF MONEY...Sadely, we ended up giving it back to the casino and walked out collectively $50 in the hole. Not bad for all day craps play, I think!

SATURDAY: I took my mom to one of my favorite Michigan spots: Frankenmuth! I love love love this little Bavarian town! It is basically a real life Christmas village. Its just pure magic.

After a fun day of cheese shops, fudge shops, and Christmas shops...we drove back to East Lansing and went to a movie. I had been dying to see the movie Frozen and I thought my mom was the perfect person to see it with...since she is really a kid at heart just like me! The movie was even more amazing than I thought it would be and I would recommend it to anyone! :)

SUNDAY: Sadly, the day had arrived that my mom had to leave and head back to California. She contemplated staying a little longer, but with my crazy busy schedule, I would never really see her. So, we said our goodbyes and she left for the airport.

It was such a great Thanksgiving! I loved having my mom here and being able to spend a holiday with her! Even though I love Michigan, this trip kind of made me realize how nice it would be to live closer to home...which is another point in favor of me heading back to the West Coast for residency. We will see how that goes!

Specialty Search: General Surgery

The months of September and October were definitely a challenge. With the start of my 2 month long surgery clerkship, I knew that I was in for a long period of little sleep, high expectations and little sympathy for my complaints. Although I knew it would be difficult, I had absolutely no idea how to prepare myself. Even though S is a surgeon and he gave me as many pointers as he could, there isn't much you can do to learn the etiquette of an OR without just sucking it up and living through the trial and error.

The first week of the clerkship was kind of a joke. It consisted of lectures, suture clinics and IV drawing workshops. The hours were super easy and I loved every minute of it!

Too bad the easiness didn't last...

The next two weeks, I was on Trauma surgery; one week on days and one week on nights. These weeks were pretty good. The mornings consisted of rounding, upon rounding, upon rounding. Around 1PM everyday, the other med student and I would sneak away from even more rounding to go hang out in the ER and wait for trauma activations to roll in. There were a lot of MVCs, some GSWs, and a few burns/explosions. Overall, it was pretty cool! My week of nights was really awesome; when you are on nights, your team is responsible for everything surgical that goes on in the hospital. So, we covered all the traumas, all the pre-op and post-op surgical patients and anyone coming in with emergency surgical problems that needed to be operated on over night. So, we stayed busy and had a decent amount of responsibility, which is good enough for a medical student. Overall, I enjoyed my time on trauma service, but was ready to really get into an operating room and get my sterilized and double-glove-protected hands dirty with surgeries.

For the next 5 weeks, I spent my time alternating between the general surgery service and the "specialty" services that included plastic surgery, pediatric surgery, orthopedic surgery, colorectal surgery and many more! The first few days were awesome...the surgeries were cool, the gave us a decent amount of responsibility, and the majority of people were welcoming to students, which was a happy surprise on this rotation.

The rest of the rotation can be summarized in the good v. bad.

THE GOOD:
Overall, the cases were very cool. I really really liked the OR. I liked having patients that would come in with problems that you could take into a room, cut it out, sew them back together and occassionally fix the problem. It was a big change from Internal Medicine, in which a lot of the cases I just felt like we were playing a waiting game, without actually helping the patients. So, in that sense, I really did enjoy surgery. I also liked that during surgery, medical students have a job. It might just be cutting sutures, or retracting, or occasionally closing the skin...but we were able to use our hands and be apart of the action.

THE BAD:
While I did enjoy a lot of the rotation, there were definitely a lot of negatives. First, and most obvious, were the horrible terrible ridiculous hours. On a good day, we could show up at 6 AM and would be released by 6PM. However, Wednesdays and Thursdays we would have morning didactics, so we would have to be there and start work at 5 AM. What made this even worse, is that every few days, we were on call until 9PM-ish. I was a lucky student that happened to have a lot of Wednesday night calls. So, I would wake up at 3:45 AM, start work at 5 AM, stay until 9PM, get home at 9:30ish, and would have between 9:30PM-3:45AM to get everything I needed to do taken care of, eat and sleep. Yeah. It sucked. I knew that I could survive that short term, but man oh man I could never be a surgery resident that lived that every day. The second thing I didn't really like was everyone's attitude. Even though the residents and attendings were (mostly) all nice, you could just tell they were angry. It has nothing to do with the individual people...its just the culture of surgery that makes you that way. I know that it doesn't have to be that way and that there are many surgeons that this is not true for...but compared to Internal Medicine, there sure seemed to have a larger proportion of angry surgeons than IM docs. Finally, I didn't love the lack of continuity of care. Yeah, sure...there was some. There were patients that came to the service A LOT...like, several times in the two months that we were there. Also, doctors will see clinic patients, operate on them, and see them again for follow-up...BUT, it just wasn't the same. The care, for a majority of patients, seemed fragmented...and I didn't love that.

So, overall....I did enjoy the rotation. I'm 99.9% sure General Surgery is NOT my chosen field...but it was still a good experience. I learned a decent amount..and hey, you have to go through a lot of specialities to cross things off before you can figure out what you're calling is! Right?

Thats all for now!